Hunting up Old Bones.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume IX, Issue 2909, 28 May 1888, Page 2

Hunting up Old Bones.

The new study of osteology is producing more wonderful results than ever. Whether the bones which were recently exhumed, exhibited, examined and experimented upon at Canterbury, to the exacerbation of every decent person's feelings as to the treatment due to the long-departed dead, are or are not those of St Thomas i-Becket, appears now to depend on the reading of a single letter—that is to say, whether a certain word in a certain fusty, musty, old manuscript should be read "burned" or "buried." It is a most terrible controversy. Is it an " i" or is it an " n I"—that is the question, which threatens to unsettle the wits of the learned divines engaged upon it. Meanwhile, however, the skull of bold Becket—or another one—has turned up in the cathedral of Marsala, in Sioily, where it appears to have somelicjw stimulated the wine trade of that place. The result is a singular one to liaVe been produced by a Saint's relic. But anyhow, St Thomas' cranium is a great attraction to the pious people of Marsala, and we do not see that the Saint's Sicilian adventures are so very much more remarkable than those just announced in connection with the body of Alexander the Great, The Macedonian conquerer is known to have died at Babylon two thousand years ago; never-the-less certain learned persons claimed to have discovered a. stone coffin containing his remains at Saida, the wretched little Syrian yillage which is all that now stands of Sidon—the Liverpool of King Solomen's time. That a sarchophagus has been discovered we can believe, but how Alexander's corpse managed to transport itself across the whole breadth of Mesopotamia is a mutter that seems to me to require some explanation, Indeed wo are rather inclined to take pleasure in tho conviction that the bone-hunters in both the cases of the saint and of the slayer are deserving of exactly the same degree of trust as tho Mahammedan mollahs who every year point out to pilgrims at Mecca, a pair of mounds three hundred feet long which they gravely declare to be the graves of Adam and Eve,