312. THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY 



Swedenborg, whom he must thus have studied, and who may well have been 

 able to inspire him with ideas pointing in that direction; at all events, he 

 has not adopted his predecessor's theory of the essential part played by the 

 pyramid-cells in the work of the brain; on the contrary, he overlooks them 

 and believes that the cerebral cortex is composed of matted nerve-fibres. 

 Gall's theory nervertheless represents a great advance towards the modern 

 standpoint and has undoubtedly exercised considerable influence on the 

 development of cerebral research, in spite of contemporary opposition. This 

 is also the case with Gall's assumption of hereditary intellectual tendencies, 

 which represented a definite advance in face of the naive belief of the philoso- 

 phers of enlightenment that all men possess like tendencies to virtue and 

 genius, which require only proper education in order to be able to develop. 

 Unfortunately Gall went to the most ridiculous extremes in developing his 

 theory; he sought and discovered in the brain organs for all kinds of intellec- 

 tual and moral qualities, for genius and beauty, love and piety, and even for 

 stealing and murder. And he went so far as to imagine that he could discern 

 these very qualities in the irregularities on the surface of the skull, since he 

 believed the skull to be exactly fashioned after the brain. This study, which 

 he called "cranioscopy," rapidly degenerated into sheer humbug; in particu- 

 lar, the discovery of the "bumps of genius," which were supposed to denote 

 special talent, brought much profit to quacks and rogues. This expression 

 has survived in modern phraseology as the best-known relic of Gall's activi- 

 ties, which has served to conceal the really sound work that he accomplished 

 in biological science. 



Another scientist who was closely connected with natural philosophy 

 was JoHANN Christian Reil (1759-1813). Son of a clergyman of East Fries- 

 land, he studied medicine at Gottingen and Halle, practised for some years 

 in his home district, was then appointed professor of internal medicine at 

 Halle, and at the same time became town physician there. When the Uni- 

 versity of Berlin was founded, he was elected a professor, but resigned his 

 post upon the outbreak of the War of Independence against Napoleon and 

 volunteered as an army surgeon. When acting in that capacity he fell a 

 victim to the typhus epidemic that raged during the war. 



Reil's life-theory 

 Reil's influence has been both many-sided and important. He was highly 

 esteemed by his contemporaries; among Scandinavian doctors Israel Hwasser 

 in particular studied and admired him. As a practitioner he enjoyed a wide 

 field of activities; he recorded in a compendious work all the knowledge that 

 his age possessed of fevers and their treatment. Still more influential, how- 

 ever, was his work in the sphere of psychiatry, which he radically reformed; 

 he effected improvements in the appalling conditions prevailing in the luna- 

 tic asylums and insisted upon the elevation of psychiatry to the position of 



