PHRENOLOGY, 45 



not be calculated upon with nicety. Circumstances not only environ 

 essentials, but alter their shapes and seemings. The skull, as a cir- 

 cumstance surrounding the brain, may represent it badly, as a poor 

 gift of language may choke the utterance of a rich heart. It by no 

 means follows that there is harmonious co-development of the parts, 

 but on the other hand, the instances of this perfection are rare. 

 Brains may be born into inconvenient cases, just as good human 

 minds, veritable immortal children, are born into idiot brains. 

 Difference of form, also, and consequent difference of distribution of 

 the constituent parts, may be expected between different races. If 

 the climate and the wants of life are various, the shape of the life 

 and its parts will be various also; the faculties will consent to the 

 circumstances and grow in their training. Ideality will not fight 

 with hope for any precise chair of bone, when the relations alter, 

 and another piece is naturally offered. A faculty squeezed in by 

 circumstances will rise up somewhere else, or cause the protrusion 

 of some other part. It seems clear, then, that the brain will con- 

 sent to be packed differently; that if its external world or climate, 

 viz., the skull and membranes, are of a new type, its resources will 

 not be overset, but developed in a new direction. But this does not 

 disprove phrenology, though it may perhaps cause us to hope that 

 there are phrenologies besides the European, and that this little 

 science also is of a spherical richness. 



Perhaps we have been too much accustomed to regard the exterior 

 head as a mere wrappage of the brain, whereas, like other externals, 

 it is independent like the brain itself, and has its own centres of 

 structure and function. We have likened it to a country or climate 

 that the brain inhabits, and pursuing the analogy we may say, that 

 the inhabitant did not make his country, nor can he modify it, 

 excepting in so far as he is modified by it. True, he is destined to 

 mould it to his wants; but then the wants themselves draw their 

 forms from the climate. Hence we see that in the greatest shell or 

 skull which is built up around every man, namely, his vault of sky, 

 and what it contains, a typical difference exists which cannot be 

 reduced for different vaults to a single rule : the skull of heaven 

 has many shapes, and societies or brains fill them differently : 

 destructiveness in one wages itself upon lions and tigers, or is com- 



