An anthropological study of some portraits of Shakespeare and of Burns : (abstract) / Arthur Keith.

  • Keith, Arthur, Sir, 1866-1955.
Date:
[1914]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: An anthropological study of some portraits of Shakespeare and of Burns : (abstract) / Arthur Keith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    of Arran, is just that represented by the skull of Robert Burns. The same type is found in the long barrows of England. Of the six skulls, one was 210 millimetres long, another 201. In Fig. 13, one of these skulls—one of the most complete — from the Cairn at Clachaig is represented. The outline of Burns’ skull, drawn to the same scale, is indicated by a stippled line. There can be no doubt as to the identity of types. The Poet’s skull is fuller and wider than the neolithic ones. In the neolithic period—4000 years or more before our time—the race to which Burns belonged lived in the country round the Firth of Clyde. We find that the ancestor of the poet who settled in Kincardine and took the name of Burness was Pig. 12.—View of the cast of Burns’ skull seen from above and contrasted with a similar view of the Olmo skull. originally Walter Campbell, of Argyll. His mother, Agnes Brown, was an Ayrshire woman. Burns, then is a direct descendant of the long-headed people who lived in England and Scotland during the neolithic period—at least, during the later part of that period. Where those long-headed people were originally evolved, where they came from, we do not know. They were certainly of the same stock as that race which goes by the name of Iberian. When they reached Britain, they found that country already populated by a long-headed and closely allied race. Thus we have in Shakespeare and Burns— in our two national poets—representatives of two of the most diver- gent of European stocks. If we use the term “ Celt ” in the same sense as it is employed on the Continent, then we must call Shakes-