148 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



it is placed in a locality it is nevertheless not there in a local 

 manner ; it is present in the stomach in some such way as 

 light is present in a burning wick." 



Concurrently with these ideas regarding the extra-cranial 

 seats of the soul, there had been schools of thought from the 

 earliest times which regarded the central nervous system as 

 that to which the mind was related. As long ago as about 

 300 B.C. Herophilus of Alexandria had imagined the soul to 

 be inside the fluid of the cerebral ventricles — these innermost 

 recesses of the entire body, the mental Holy of Holies. 

 Herophilus regarded the fourth ventricle as particularly mental : 

 this is very interesting to us, seeing that below that cavity 

 some of the most important vital centres in the nervous system 

 are undoubtedly situated. Claudius Galen (died 200 a.d.), to 

 do him justice, taught that the brain was the place where the 

 soul and intellect had their home. 



We may pass over all the centuries intervening between 

 Galen's death and the date of the publication of Vesalius' 

 great work, the De Corporis Humani Fabrica, 1543, because 

 they contributed nothing towards clear thinking about the 

 localisation of mental attributes. The father of Anatomy 

 (15 14-1564), to whom physiological problems were by no 

 means uninteresting, has the following prescient remarks on 

 the mind as related to the brain : " But how the brain performs 

 its functions in imagination, in reasoning, in thinking, or in 

 memory (or in whatever way, following the dogmas of this 

 or that man, you prefer to classify or name the several locations 

 of the chief soul) I can form no opinion whatever. Nor do 

 I think that anything more will be found out by anatomy or 

 by the methods of those theologians who deny to brute animals 

 all power of reasoning and indeed all the faculties belonging 

 to what we call the chief soul. For as regards the structure 

 of the brain the monkey, dog, horse, cat, and all quadrupeds 

 which I have hitherto examined, and indeed all birds and many 

 kinds of fish, resemble man in almost 'every particular. Nor 

 do we by dissection come upon any difference which would 

 indicate that the functions of those animals should be treated 

 otherwise than those of man. In proportion to the size of 

 the body, first the ape and then the dog exhibit a large brain, 

 suggesting that animals excel in the size of their brains in 

 proportion as they seem to be endowed with the faculties of 



