The Sun. — 1865-01-27 (London, England)

SMYTHE V. SMYTHE AND JONES.  This was a suit instituted by the husband against the wife for a dissolution of marriage. The case was of the ordinary description, and granted a decree nisi with costs.  Cerebral Organisation of Kohl..  That Franz Muller spoke truly in denying his guiltiness of murder, whether designed, or actually perpetrated by his hand, may be admitted as likely by persons competent to infer character from cerebral organisation. For Mullees head stands forward boldly from that animalised contour of brain which is now becoming familiar to persons much in contact with the lowest class of convicts. " The type of the criminal head and face," says a late writer in the Times, "is well known in Portland and its neighbourhood." . .  So well is this type and its varieties known to duly informed phrenologists, that any of them with a little skill in drawing could delineate with considerable accuracy the outline of the head of any convict, the details of whose life and crime were well established. In the case of Kohl, who Was executed on the 26th inst. at Chelmsford, for the murder of ruhrhop, there could be no doubt as to the type of his head. By the kindness of the High Sheriff of Essex I was permitted to take a cast of Kohl's head after his execution. The reality almost exceeded what I expected to see. If, as there is now little ground for doubting, the inborn moral and religious sentiments are the functional result of action in the coronal parts, or organs, of the brain, the animal feelings being in like manner connected with the basilar region, then Kohl may be said to have come into existence devoid of a moral nature ; and therefore to have been, what he has proved himself to have been, a born brute. I doubt if in the large number of casts of murderers' heads in the phrenological collections there be half a dozen of so low and dangerous a type as Kohl's. In addition to the ordinary characteristics of the brute man, Kohl had that one which intensifies every other. He was a voracious eater and an epicure. The day before his execution he asked for an extra allowance of meat and bread, and at his last breakfast he called for new breed. Cceteris paribus, the heavy feeder is ever the more brutal. Kohl's demeanour since his condemnation was an alternation of outbursts of savage rage and lapses into meek and smiling craftiness. He had to be watched as if he were actually that to which his nature so closely approached, a homicidal maniac, or a ferocious wild beast. The very full development of his perceptive organs gave him the intelligence so remarkable in most. of the savage races. He was " quick to learn," but not " wise to know." Of power to trace, prospectively, the concatenation of cause and 'effect he must have been miserably deficient. His forehead was "villainously low." Of coronal, or moral, development his organisation was "below Zero." Religious and moral sentiment he must have been almost totally devoid of. When even on the brink of "the jump into the dark," (the fear of which alone restrains many of the savages in this country from murdering), a word of truth did not burst from Kohl's lips. The contrast between the heads of Muller and Kohl must be very interesting to phrenologists. Even to the number of intelligent persons who, from ignorance of the doctrines of phrenology, or inattention to the language of the head (not an easy one to learn) think of.phrenology as if it were a crotchet of a few minds—not a new revelation of an original law of nature, which not to know and obey is to be ever in danger—the crimes, the fates, and the cerebral organisations of these men ought to teach a lesson of at least modesty in judging, and in speaking of, a subject of which all who have not studied it can speak only at random. Of course this observation does not apply to " critics," who have the privilege of knowing all things, not by ex but by in-tuition, and who are " all ready made." Let us not forget, in our detestation of crime, and in the just punishment of criminals, that no man chooses his own mental organisation, nor his education. In phrenology man is informed of a whole code of laws, revealed in God's good time, but as yet lamentably ignored and despised, even in quarters where all the divine laws ought to be reverently studied, and from which they should be loudly promulgated. School of Phrenology, 111, Strand,  C.