134 THE XKKUUS SYSTK.M AND ITS CONSKKVATK )\ 



further experiment- on pigeons. He came to believe that 

 one part is like another and that the result of an injury 

 i- determined l>y its extent and not by its ])osition. Speak-^ 

 in^ somewhat crudely, it may lie said that this view made 

 the working of the brain comparable with that of the 

 liver: all its parts were supposed to lie working in the 

 sime way and all its functions would suffer quanti- 

 tatively rather than qualitatively from a circumscribed 

 injury. 



From the time of Flourens to the present scientific 

 opinion has shifted back and forth in a curious manner. 

 In his own career he found himself called upon to defend 

 hi-- claims against a school of ingenious persons who 

 upheld the doctrine of a very precise localization of 

 cerebral properties. This teaching wa.- presently known as 

 phrenology 1 and att racted much notice. In the beginning 

 the phrenologists were sincere in purpose and more or 

 less scientific in method. Their successors departed 

 widely from the early tradition- of the school, and are now 

 found in the purlieus of our cities along with palmists and 

 clairvoyants. The general conception was beginning to 

 be discredited when Holmes- wrote of it so incisively. 

 Regarding the claim that it is possible to tell what is 

 within the skull by measuring its slight convexities and 

 depressions, lie well said that this was like laying one'- 

 finger on the iron wall of a safe and saying: "Under this 

 spot lies a ten-dollar bill." 



Francis Joseph ( lall, the Austrian founder of phrenology, 

 seems to have had little interest in the brain as related to 

 the body, but much in its assumed correlation with men- 

 tal endowment- and defects. lie and his disciples made 

 careful measurements of the contours of the head in all 

 types () f men, from the most gifted to the most defective 

 and depraved. A prominence upon the surface of the 



1 The ar! irlc "I'lircnolojry" in (}\<> Kiirvrlopcilia Britaumra can In- 



recommended. 



"The IW.-ir :it Ilic Breakfast Tal.lr," liiv.-r-i.lr K.lition, 

 I!)', Jill I. 



