336 CRITICAL NOTICES OF NEW PUBLICATIONS. ~~ 
son’s title we take to be an assumption, notwithstanding his excuse. 
In 1815 he translated (anonymously) Professor Blumenbach’s Insti- 
tutiones Physiologica. In 1817 he published a second edition, with 
his name, and the addition of one hundred and fifty pages of notes. 
In 1820 he published a third edition, with two hundred pages of 
notes. In 1824 he published a fourth edition, from a new edition 
of the original work, with three hundred and fifty pages of notes, 
which notes greatly exceeded the text. The fifth edition is a still 
farther enlargement and improvement on its predecessors, and brings 
before the reader very nearly all that is known in the most lucid 
manner, and expressly calculated for “the general reader ; since 
such works are now read as much out of the profession as by medi- 
cal men,” as they well deserve to be. Dr. Elliotson has thought 
proper—and we have no quarrel with his judgment on this point— 
to omit a great deal of Blumenbach’s text, not from any demerit, 
but because the science has advanced beyond the last edition of 
Blumenbach—the patriarch of physiology. The deficiency is made 
up by excellent notes, consisting of reference to, and extracts from, 
every accessible and respectable authority. Now we are at a loss to 
discover by what reasoning the omission of Blumenbach’s and the 
substitution of fifty others’ matter can entitle Dr. E. to call the 
work “ Elliotson’s Physiology :” ‘‘ Everybody’s Physiology” were a 
fitter name. However, he expresses, with great confidence, that he 
is sure Blumenbach will not object (we have not heard that he did 
in 1835),* and we have even a less right ; yet it may appear to the 
readers of the work that Dr. E. is rather to be regarded as a pro- 
found critic than a professed physiologist ; in which first character 
he leaves nothing to be wished for in the way of candour and fitness ; 
albeit he is often self-complacent, sometimes supercilious, and occa- 
sionally trenchant: yet these are more allied to the confidence inse- 
parable from competence and courage, than vanity and ill nature. 
And it should be remembered that his unselfish nature, preferring 
truth for her own sake, and always perilling his ease where he be- 
lieves he is her champion, he has sometimes incurred the hostility 
of ignorance and envy to an extent that might well excuse a more 
energetic defence of himself than even he makes in the second part 
of the present work. It must be also remembered that he is a true 
disciple of Dr. Gall, which is a very different affair from being a 
** phrenologist,” in the received acceptation of that term. That 
branch of physiology as treated by Gall and defended by Dr. E. is 
another thing than what is assailed by its opponents and understood 
by the “bumpists.” On the subject in question there is greater 
misapprehension than on any other with which men, not extremely 
scientific in their occupations, meddle ; and as its propounders have 
been oftener amateurs than professors, the subject has suffered by 
the incompetence of the teacher, more in actually misleading than 
* Vide preface to’ the fifth edition, part i, February, 1835. ‘The second 
part is recently out, 1838. 
