Ay, but her forehead’s low, as mine’s as high. Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act IV., Sc. IV.
Cleopatra. Bear’st thou her face in mind? is’t long or round? Messenger. Round, even to faultiness. Cleopatra. For the most part too, They are foolish that are so. Her hair, what colour? Messenger. Brown, madame, and her forehead As low as you would wish it. Antony and Cleopatra, Act III., Sc. III.
The old superstition that much hair on the head indicated a want of intellect is alluded to in Two Gentlemen of Verona.
Speed. Item, she hath more hair than wit. Laun. More hair than wit,—it may be; I’ll prove it: the cover of the salt hides the salt, and therefore it is more than the salt; the hair that covers the wit is more than the wit; for the greater hides the less. Act III., Sc. I.
Ant. S. Why is Time such a niggard of hair, being, as it is, so plentiful an excrement? Dro. S. Because it is a blessing that he bestows on beasts; and what he hath scanted men in hair he hath given them in wit. Ant. S. Why, but there’s many a man hath more hair than wit. Dro. S. Not a man of those but he hath the wit to lose his hair. Ant. S. Why, thou did’st conclude hairy men plain dealers without wit. Comedy of Errors, Act II., Sc. II.
This great voluminous pamphlet may be said To be like one that hath more hair than head; More excrement than body: trees which sprout With broadest leaves have still the smallest fruit. Suckling—Aglaura.
He had some idea of the sympathetic connection between the organs of the body, and has furnished us with a good example of superstition connected with sympathy. It was an old superstition that the wounds of a murdered person would bleed afresh if the body was touched by the murderer, and this has nicely been brought out in Richard III.
O, gentlemen, see, see! dead Henry’s wounds Open their congeal’d mouths and bleed afresh! Blush, blush, thou lump of foul deformity; For ’tis thy presence that exhales this blood From cold and empty veins, where no blood dwells, Thy deed, inhuman and unnatural, Provokes this deluge most unnatural. Act I., Sc. II.
Dunglison explains these superstitions “either on purely physical principles, or on the excited imagination of the observer,” and cites two interesting cases—one attested by John Demarest, coroner of Bergen county, New Jersey, (1767), and the other which occurred near Easton, Pennsylvania. Of the latter case he says: “The superstition has, indeed, its believers among us. On the trial of Getter, who was executed about five years ago (1833) in Pennsylvania, for the murder of his wife, a female witness deposed on oath as follows: ‘If my throat was to be cut, I could tell, before God Almighty, that the deceased smiled when he (the murderer) touched her. I swore this before the justices, and that she bled considerably. I was sent for to dress her and lay her out. He touched her twice. He made no hesitation about doing it. I also swore before the justice that it was observed by other people in the house.’” Dyer cites a number of similar cases, and quotes the following as a supposed cause of the phenomenon from the “Athenian Oracle,” (1-106): “The blood is congealed in the body for two or three days, and then becomes liquid again, in its tendency to corruption. The air being heated by many persons coming about the body is the same thing to it as motion is. ’Tis observed that dead bodies will bleed in a concourse of people, when murderers are absent as well as present, yet legislators have thought it fit to authorize it, and use this trial as an argument, at least to frighten, though ’tis no conclusive one to condemn them.” The practice, however, caused many an innocent spectator to receive the fatal penalty.