It is no fiction that after British Christianity had been driven by Saxon Paganism from Britain into Ireland, the Irish Celts furnished the best schools for literature, and the ablest scholars in Europe—and it is no fiction that ever since the Saxon has set foot in Ireland it has continued to droop and decay, until it is now a foul bog of iniquity; a wretched irreclaimable sink of inhuman vice and monstrous infamy.
Its Cogitativeness has been repressed till it cannot reflect nor appreciate any but physical modes of escape from thraldom. This is but the caged wild beast gnawing at its chain, and snapping at its keeper, whether his hand approaches to feed or to beat it.
It may be said, escape lies open to it in self-elevation, in moral rectitude, and industrious exertion; but it is too late for it to see and understand that. We might as well say to the broken leg, walk now, you walked once; or to the encaged madman, calm yourself and be free, you were calm and free once.
We need no better proof of the non-cogitativeness of Ireland than the facile manner in which it throws itself beneath the Juggernautic car of every demagogue, and sacrifices itself to his avaricious cruelty. We need no better proof of the truth of our theory, than that the Nose of the same nation is deficient in Cogitativeness, and is for the most part thin and sharp. It has not, however, lost the Romano-Greek profile, usual among the Caucasian races.
This is true in the main; but unhappily more recent information compels us to modify it, and add another proof of Nasology from degradation of physical structure simultaneously with mental degradation. “There are certain districts in Leitrim, Sligo, and Mayo” (as pointed out by an intelligent writer in the Dublin University Magazine, No. 48), chiefly inhabited by descendants of the native Irish driven by the British from Armagh and the south of Down, about two centuries ago. These people, whose ancestors were well-grown, able-bodied, and comely, are now reduced to an average stature of five feet two inches, are pot-bellied, bow-legged, and abortively featured, and are especially remarkable for “open projecting mouths, with prominent teeth, and exposed gums, (_i. e._ prognathous-jawed—the Negro type), their advancing cheekbones, and _depressed noses_, bearing barbarism on their very front.” In other words, within so short a period, they seem to have acquired a prognathous type of skull, like the savages of Australia, “thus giving such an example of deterioration from known causes, as almost compensates by its value to future ages, for the sufferings and debasement which past generations have endured in perfecting its appalling lesson.”[46]