AN INTERESTING SPECIMEN.

Thames Star, Volume XV, Issue 4874, 23 August 1884, Page 1

AN INTERESTING SPECIMEN.

A few years ago there dwelt in Couniy Galway one of the funniest,,jilliest dogs that ever developed a taste for fun, whisky, and pretty girls— strong points in the Irißh character. Terence O'Brady, as we will call him, or " The Squoire, 1' as he was generally, dubbed, was a general favorite.with high and low, and his prac ticaljokes made him at once.theterror and the admiration of " the countryside." It is about one of these same jokes that I am going to tell you now. One fine, bright

morning "the Squire" was taking a ramble ' through his fields, when his eye lit on a turnip of Borbdignagian proportions. It was as large as a man's head, and covered ~ 'on one side with the queerest knobs, lumps or bumps imaginable. In a word, it was altogether' a phenomenal turnip. So v thought the Squire as he turned it over in' his' band. Suddenly a brilliant idea occurred to him. Phrenology was at ' that time the rage, and London was fall of professors of the so»ealled science, who delivered lectures, wrote books and pamphlets, &nd extracted mon»y from the pockets of the credulous ly " feeling*their bumps," reading their characters off " like the words of a printed book." To

one of the best known of these scientific gentlemen, yhom we will call Professor Quack, and who was making a handsome income out of "bumps" at the lime of nay story, the Squire despatched a plaster cast of the big turnip, and wilh the offering he sent a letter, setting forth how , he, Squire O'Brady, rummaging in a v lumber-room at his country seat, bad , accidentally come upon the cast of the head of a/notorious malefactor who was

handed in chains many years before, for • a cold-blooded murder, and.'the cast of whose villainous " upper story," together with a detailed account of the crime for

which he forfeited his life, had been pre- - served by some phrenologist in embryo who had not lived to see the' reading of bumps reduced to a Bcience and become the study of'eminent personages such as " Professor Quack, who wag begged to accept the cast if thought worthy of a place in his well known collection/ After the lapse of a few days the Squire got s reply warmly thanking him , for his most interesting specimen. "That ' it was the cast of a malefactor's skull," the Professor wrote, " was only too probable, as the organ of" destructireness " was abnormally developed, while " conscientiousness '■ was almost entirely wanting. Altogether the cast afforded such a

strong confirmation (if any were needed) ' of the truth of phrenology that be (the Professor) would crave one more favor from his correspondent—and that was the loan of the skull itself." " By Jove ! " said the Squire, " he shall have it!" And he sent up the turnip !