846 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



unsafe to deny it. The telephone is but 

 a thing of yesterday, and was at first 

 supposed to be only a curious play- 

 thing. But already "there's millions 

 in it." How far it is developed as a 

 business is shown by the fact that a 

 convention of twenty-one companies 

 meets at Niagara to look after the in- 

 terests of this new and rapidly extend- 

 ing means of intercommunication. 



LITERARY NOTICES. 



The Brain as an Organ of Mind. By 

 II. Charlton Bastian, M. D., F. R. S. 



D. Appleton & Co. Pp.708. Price, $2.50. 



Dr. Bastian's new book is one of great 

 value and importance. The knowledge it 

 gives is universal in its claims, and of mo- 

 ment to everybody. It should be forthwith 

 introduced as a manual into all colleges, 

 high schools, and normal ' schools in the 

 country. Not to be made a matter of ordi- 

 nary mechanical recitations, but that its 

 subject may arrest attention and rouse in- 

 terest, and be lodged in the minds of stu- 

 dents in connection with observations and 

 experiments that will give reality to the 

 knowledge acquired. 



As often illustrated in the pages of this 

 magazine, we know nothing of mind except 

 as an organic manifestation. Throughout 

 the entire scale of animate nature, intelli- 

 gence is an endowment of a nervous mech- 

 anism; and the gradations of intelligence 

 correspond to and depend upon gradations 

 in the structure of the nervous system. 

 The laws of mind have their basis in this 

 material substratum, and mental operations 

 are conditioned upon physiological process- 

 es. The wonderful apparatus of sensation, 

 distributed over the periphery of the body 

 and relating the individual to all that is 

 outward, and the still more wonderful or- 

 gan of consciousness and mental power 

 the great cerebral center are material 

 structures, and the psychical effects which 

 they produce are accompaniments of mate- 

 rial molecular change. We think, and feel, 

 and remember, and imagine, and carry on 

 all the processes of reasoning through the 

 corporeal activities of the brain as the great 



center of nervous operations. We are born 

 high or low in the intellectual grade accord- 

 ing to the properties of this mechanism ; 

 and these properties are variable in an al- 

 most infinite degree. We get the benefit 

 of a perfected stock through generations of 

 cultivation, or we inherit incapacity through 

 generations of neglect, the results in both 

 cases being embodied in the nervous organ- 

 ism. It is therefore impossible to get at 

 the science of mind so as to grasp the laws 

 of mental growth, or rationally to carry on 

 the work of mental cultivation without a 

 knowledge of the vital mechanism by which 

 all mind is displayed. No book, therefore, 

 can be fitter for collegiate study or as a 

 guide in the work of education than a well- 

 prepared treatise on the physiological basis 

 of intelligence. There are many valuable 

 publications upon this subject, but we have 

 seen none among them that promises to be 

 so satisfactory as a text-book as Dr. Bas- 

 tian's work on " The Brain as an Organ of 

 Mind." 



We have often discussed this subject, 

 but its great importance, and the disposi- 

 tion to ignore it, nay, the actual dread of it 

 on the part of many well-meaning people, 

 make it necessary that there should be no 

 relaxation in the efforts to diffuse correct 

 ideas concerning it. For thousands of years 

 the mind has been regarded as an entity be- 

 longing to an immaterial sphere, in some 

 mysterious way brought into relation with 

 the material order, but still so separated 

 from it, and so far above it, that mental 

 problems must be studied alone, and only 

 by their own peculiar methods. This is the 

 metaphysical point of view which was uni- 

 versally pursued before science arose, and 

 is still the prevailing method of regarding 

 mental phenomena. But it is a partial 

 method, dealing only with one side of the 

 subject, and lacking the foundation that is 

 necessary to give scientific clearness and 

 validity to the study of mind. Modern sci- 

 ence has. given a new extension to mental 

 studies, but it has at the same time greatly 

 complicated them, and introduced a factor 

 requiring laborious and progressive elucida- 

 tion; and the consequence is, that many 

 prefer the older and easier method, regard- 

 less of the character of the results. Multi- 

 tudes also shrink with a kind of horror from 



