THE OLD PHRENOLOGY AND THE NEW. 475 



mosphere. The visits of shooting-stars to the earth have been lately 

 brouo-ht within the province of astronomy, and numbers of these bright 

 objects, which take part in extraordinary showers, have been found 

 to come from the tracks of certain comets. It would, accordingly, 

 seem that cometary bodies have portions of their matter separated 

 from them, and occasionally sent as meteors into the atmospheres of 

 the planets. The dismemberment which, in such cases, is occasioned 

 by the heat, and more rarely by the attraction of the sun, is analogous 

 to that which planets would suffer in very narrow orbits ; but it occurs 

 on a scale infinitely smaller, and can never be productive of any very 

 conspicuous results. The greatest exhibition of shooting-stars in our 

 atmosphere could never be observed from any of the neighboring plan- 

 ets ; and, if armies of meteors were sent from many systems to invade 

 a single one, and had their orbits and positions, best arranged for a 

 simultaneous charge on the atmosphere of one of its larger orbs, the 

 light which they could produce would fail to exhibit the remarkable 

 features observed in incipient brightness and the gradual decline of 

 temporary stars. 



♦*» 



THE OLD PHKENOLOGY AND THE NEW. 



By Dr. ANDKEW WILSON. 



THERE has ever lain a strange fascination, for culture and ignorance 

 alike, in the attempt to diagnose the intellect and character of 

 man from the outward manifestations of his face and skull. The prob- 

 lem of character and its interpretation is as old as Plato, and may prob- 

 ably be shown to be more ancient still. Egyptian soothsayers and 

 Babylonian astrologers were hardly likely to have omitted the indexing 

 of character as a profitable and at the same time legitimate exercise of 

 their art. The forecasting of f utvire events and the casting of nativities 

 were studies likely enough to bear a friendly relationship to the deter- 

 mination of character from face, from fingers, or from skull and brain 

 itself. But the histories of palmistry and soothsaying, with that of 

 physiognomy, are they not all writ in the encyclop.'edias ? We shall 

 not occupy space with an historical resicme of the efforts of philosophy 

 in swaddling-clothes attempting to wrestle with the great problem of 

 mind and matter ; nor shall we at present venture to oppose a scientific 

 denial to Shakespeare's dictum that 



.... there's no art 

 To find the mind's construction in the face. 



Darwin's " Expression of the Emotions," the development of facial 

 contortions, and the interesting study of the genesis of smiles and tears, 

 and of the thousand and one signs which make up the visible and emo- 



