THE LINGERING ADMIRERS OF PHRENOLOGY. 



BY PROF. CLELAND. 



To slay those that are already slain may be excellent sport 

 to employ the courage of a Falstaff, but the reader perusing 

 the title of this article may perhaps be disposed to ask why 

 the pages of this review should be occupied with the discus- 

 sion of so dead a doctrine as Phrenology. The answer is, 

 that although phrenology never had much countenance from 

 scientific men, and has long since been banished by them, 

 with one consent, to the limbo of exploded chimeras, yet 

 among educated men and women not physiologists, and not 

 pretending to know anything about anatomy, it still holds its 

 grounds wonderfully, and counts considerable numbers of 

 people who believe in its miraculo/us skull maps ; while, be- 

 sides these, there is a far more numerous class of persons, 

 including, undeniably, a certain proportion of scientific men, 

 who, admitting that the minute division of the cranial vault 

 into organs is untenable, yet profess belief in a larger map- 

 ping, and have no hesitation in relegating the reasoning 

 faculties exclusively to the forehead, and the moral senti- 

 ments and volitionary powers to other parts of the brain-pan. 



This state of matter does not exist without a sufficient 

 reason to account for it. Long before the time of Gall and 

 Spurzheim, men were in the habit, sometimes consciously, 

 and much more frequently half unconsciously, of gauging 

 the intelligence and moral qualities of their neighbors by 

 their personal appearance generally, and more particularly 

 of estimating them according to crude impressions derived 

 from th'e shapes of their heads. They judged rightly enough 

 that there was some connection between brain and mind. 

 Much of the evidence that the brain is the organ of the mind 

 js so palpable that it could not remain long hid. The effects 



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