238 STUDIES IN LIFE AND SENSE. 



variable or apparently necessary condition for the construction of a 

 phrenological "organ" of the mind the fact that the brain is the 

 organ of mind notwithstanding. 



Speaking of the " bumps " of the forehead, Mr. Holden, in his 

 classic work on " Human Osteology," remarks that they " are not 

 prominent in children, because the tables of the skull do not begin 

 to separate to any extent before puberty. From an examination of 

 more than one hundred skulls, it appears that the absence of the 

 external prominence, even in middle age, does not necessarily imply 

 the absence of the sinus (or air-cavity existing between the two 

 ' tables ' of the bone), since it may be formed by a retrocession of the 

 inner table of the skull. In old persons, as a rule, when the sinuses 

 enlarge, it is by the inner table encroaching on the brain-case. The 

 skull wall follows the shrinking brain. The range of the sinuses may 

 extend even more than half-way up the forehead, and backwards for 

 an inch or more along the orbital plate of the bone. Sometimes one 

 sinus is larger than the other, and consequently the ' bump ' on one 

 side of the forehead may naturally be more prominent than that on 

 the other. ... In the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, 

 there is an instructive collection of horizontal sections through the 

 frontal bone at the level of the sinuses. In a specimen from a man 

 set. 32, it may be observed that though the sinuses are very extensive 

 there is no external protuberance. In another from a man set. 47, 

 there are no sinuses, yet there is a great external protuberance. One 

 obvious conclusion from all this is," says Mr. Holden, " that the 

 ' bumps ' on the forehead mapped out in this situation by phrenolo- 

 gists, under the heads of 'locality/ ' form,' 'time,' 'size,' &c., do not 

 necessarily coincide with any convolutions of the brain." 



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 centre of the arguments pro and 

 con the system 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 conscientious 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. Fifty skulls were 

 selected for measurement from the famous collection of Sir William 

 Hamilton, fifty others being taken from that of Dr. Spurzheim 

 himself. In the case of the skulls of fifteen murderers, whose 



