484 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



be regarded as dealing rather with the results of the disposition of the 

 white matter than with that of the gray — and this latter assumption of 

 necessity involves a second, namely, that phrenology has no status as a 

 science of mind at all. 



There is one consideration concerning the practical application of 

 the phrenologist's assertions too important to be overlooted, namely, 

 the difficulty of detecting or of mapping out on the living head the 

 various " bumps " or organs of mind which appear to be so lucidly lo- 

 calized on the bust or chart. The observer, who might naturally think 

 the determination of the " bumps " an easy matter, has but to try to 

 reconcile with a phrenological chart, or with the brain-surface itself 

 (Fig. 1), the configuration of a friend's cranium, and he will then dis- 

 cover the impossibility of distinguishing where one faculty or organ 

 ends and where another begins. How, for instance, can the exact limits 

 of the four or five organs of mind, to be hereafter alluded to more 

 specifically, which are supposed to exist in the line of the eyebrow, be 

 determined? What is the criterion of excessive or inferior develop- 

 ment here, and how may we know when one " encroaches " upon an- 

 other to the exclusion or atrophy of the latter? The practical applica- 

 tion of phrenology indeed constitutes one of its difficulties ; and added 

 to the difficulty or impossibility of accurately mapping out the bounda- 

 ries of the phrenologist's organs, we must take into account the fact 

 that we are expected to detail these organs through, in any case, a con- 

 siderable thickness of scalp, which veils and occludes, as every anato- 

 mist knows, the intimate conformation of the skull-cap. At the most 

 the phrenologist may distinguish regions ; his exact examination of the 

 living head d la phrenological chart or bust is an anatomical impos- 

 sibility. 



But the anatomist has also something of importance to say regard- 

 ing the actual existence of certain of the "organs" of mind mapped 

 out by the phrenologist. Leaning trustfully upon their empirical de- 

 ductions, the phrenologists have frequently localized faculties and 

 organs of mind upon bony surfaces separated from the brain by an 

 intervening space of considerable kind. In so far as comparative anat- 

 omy is concerned, phrenology receives no assistance in its attempt to 

 localize mind-functions in man. An elephant is admittedly a saga- 

 cious animal, with a brain worth studying ; just as a cat or tiger pre- 

 sents us with a disposition in which, if brain-science is applicable, as it 

 should be, to lower forms of life exhibiting special traits of character, 

 destructiveness should be well represented and typically illustrated. 

 Alas for phrenology ! the bump of destructiveness in the feline races re- 

 solves itself into a mass of jaw-muscles, and the elephant's brain is 

 placed certainly not within a foot or so of the most skillful of phrenolo- 

 gical digits. The " frontal sinuses " or great air-spaces in the forehead 

 bones of the animal intervene between the front of the brain, the region 

 par excelletice of intellect according to phrenology, and the outside 



