CHAP. XVI. 



THE NEGLECT OF PHRENOLOGY. 



181 



by imperfectly educated lecturers and professors, 

 checked the official recognition it might otherwise have 

 received, and rendered it impossible for students of 

 medicine to become avowed phrenologists without in- 

 jury to their professional prospects. 



These combined influences led to its being treated as 

 altogether a fallacy; and so complete became the igno- 

 rance of it among physiologists and medical men in the 

 latter half of the century, that it was, and is, often 

 spoken of as a purely fantastic scheme, the product of 

 the imaginations of its founders, and entirely unsup- 

 ported by observation and experiment. The complete 

 ignorance of how phrenology was discovered by Gall, 

 and of the enormous body of carefully observed facts 

 and experiments it was founded upon, is well shown by 

 the absurdly trivial nature of the objections made to it, 

 even by men who might be supposed at least to have read 

 some of the works of its founders before rejecting it. 

 The most common and often-repeated objection is that 

 of the frontal sinuses and the varying thickness of the 

 skull in different parts and in different individuals, 

 which are adduced as if they were known only to the 

 objectors, and as if the eminent anatomist who devoted 

 thirty years to the study of the brain and its bony cover- 

 ing had remained quite ignorant of them! If the ob- 

 jectors had read any work upon phrenology, they would 

 have found that this was one of the very earliest of the 

 small difficulties which the phrenologists recognized and 

 overcame, and which every student learns how to allow 

 for ; while, if it were a much greater difficulty than it is, 

 it could only affect the practical application of phren- 

 ology in certain cases and to a limited extent, without in 



