THE OLD PHRENOLOGY AND THE NEW. 485 



layer of the skull. So that an observer could no more accurately con- 

 struct a phrenological chart of an elephant than he could diagnose the 

 contents of a warehouse by scanning the exterior of the building. 



Not merely, however, are the difficulties of phrenology limited to 

 the lower animals. Suppose we make a "cross-section of a human skull 

 throuo-h either the right or left side of the forehead, about half an inch 

 above the upper border of the orbit or eye cavity. We may then dis- 

 cover that man as well as the elephant possesses " frontal sinuses " or air- 

 spaces in his forehead-bone of considerable extent intervening between 

 the exterior of the skull and the contained brain. Now, in such a sec- 

 tion of the human skull, what phrenological " organs " shall we cut 

 through ? Certainly those of " individuality," " form," " size," and " col- 

 or." In placing such organs across the eyebrows, the phrenologist 

 might naturally be regarded as having proceeded on the assumption 

 that he was mapping out on the exterior of the skull a certain part of 

 the brain-surface. What shall be said of his procedure, however, when 

 the reader learns that a section of the skull made as indicated through 

 these organs shows that they — i. e., the " organs " as marked on the 

 outside of the skull — overlie the hollow spaces or "frontal sinuses," and 

 are actually separated from the brain by cavities of considerable extent, 

 in some cases exceeding an inch ? Such a demonstration truly speaks 

 for itself, and no less so does the anatomist's discovery that the " or- 

 gan" of phrenologists known as "form" actually reposes in anything 

 but a noble position on the cavity of the nose ; that the organ of " cal- 

 culation" is a solid bony {orbital) process ; and that the size of the or- 

 gan of " language " really depends upon the want of forward projection 

 of the eye depending on the special development of a bony process on 

 which the organ of sight rests, and which in any case has nothing what- 

 ever to do with the brain. Of language more anon ; but enough has 

 been said to show that a connection with the brain is not an invariable 

 or apparently necessary condition for the construction of a phrenologi- 

 cal " organ " of the mind — the fact that the brain is the organ of mind 

 notwithstanding. 



But neither does the case for phrenology fare any better when it is 

 tested by the results of the examination of crania belonging to persons 

 whose family or personal history was well known, and whose characters, 

 in respect of their thorough and stable formation, would therefore serve 

 as a test of phrenological or any other system of mind-explanation. In 

 the heyday of phrenological discussion, and in Edinburgh as the very 

 focus and center of the arguments ^:);'0 and C07i the sj'stem of Gall and 

 Spurzheim, a Mr. Stone, then President of the Royal Medical Society, 

 read in 1829 a paper in which the results of a most laborious and con- 

 scientious series of observations on the crania of well-known persons 

 were detailed. These results, as will presently be shown, were fatal to 

 any ideas which might have been entertained regarding the authentic 

 nature of the data on which phrenological observations were founded. 



