Rickets.—Agesilaus, Tyrtæus, Æsop, Giotto, Aristomenes, Crates, Galba, Brunelleschi, Magliabecchi, Parini, Scarron, Pope, Leopardi, Talleyrand, Scott, Owen, Gibbon, Byron, Dati, Baldini, Moses Mendelssohn, Flaxman, Hooke, were all either rachitic, lame, hunch-backed, or club-footed.
Pallor.—This has been called the colour of great men; “Pulchrum sublimium virorum florem” (S. Gregory, Orationes XIV.). It was ascertained by Marro[12] that this is one of the most frequent signs of degeneration in the morally insane.
Emaciation.—The law of the conservation of energy which rules the whole organic world, explains to us other frequent abnormalities, such as precocious greyness and baldness, leanness of the body, and weakness of sexual and muscular activity, which characterize the insane, and are also frequently found among great thinkers. Lecamus[13] has said that the greatest geniuses have the slenderest bodies. Cæsar feared the lean face of Cassius. Demosthenes, Aristotle, Cicero, Giotto, St. Bernard, Erasmus, Salmasius, Kepler, Sterne, Walter Scott, John Howard, D’Alembert, Fénelon, Boileau, Milton, Pascal, Napoleon, were all extremely thin in the flower of their age.
Others were weak and sickly in childhood; such were Demosthenes, Bacon, Descartes, Newton, Locke, Adam Smith, Boyle, Pope, Flaxman, Nelson, Haller, Körner, Pascal, Wren, Alfieri, Renan.
Ségur wrote of Voltaire that his leanness recalled his labours, and that his slight bent body was only a thin, transparent veil, through which one seemed to see his soul and genius. Lamennais was “a small, almost imperceptible man, or rather a flame chased from one point of the room to the other by the breath of his own restlessness.”[14]
Physiognomy.—Mind, a celebrated painter of cats, had a cretin-like physiognomy. So also had Socrates, Skoda, Rembrandt, Dostoieffsky, Magliabecchi, Pope, Carlyle, Darwin, and, among modern Italians, Schiaparelli, who holds so high a rank in mathematics.
Cranium and Brain.—Lesions of the head and brain are very frequent among men of genius. The celebrated Australian novelist, Marcus Clarke, when a child, received a blow from a horse’s hoof which crushed his skull.[15] The same is told of Vico, Gratry, Clement VI., Malebranche, and Cornelius, hence called a Lapide. The last three are said to have acquired their genius as a result of the accident, having been unintelligent before. Mention should also be made of the parietal fracture in Fusinieri’s skull;[16] of the cranial asymmetry of Pericles, who was on this account surnamed Squill-head (σκινοκἑφαλος) by the Greek comic writers[17]; of Romagnosi, of Bichat, of Kant,[18] of Chenevix,[19] of Dante, who presented an abnormal development of the left parietal bone, and two osteomata on the frontal bone; the plagiocephaly of Brunacci and of Machiavelli; the
