46 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 



By the manner in which I spoke of the brain, you 

 will see that I am obliged to leave phrenology sub 

 Jbve^ — out in the cold, — as not one of the household 

 of science. I am not one of its haters ; on the contrary, 

 I am grateful for the incidental good it has done. I 

 love to amuse myself in its plaster Golgothas, and listen 

 to the glib professor, as he discovers by his manipula- 

 tions 



" All that disgraced my betters met in me." 



I loved of old to see square-headed, heavy-jawed Spurz- 

 heim make a brain flower out into a corolla of marrowy 

 filaments, as Yieussens had done before him, and to hear 

 the dry-fibred but human-hearted George Combe teach 

 good sense under the disguise of his equivocal system. 

 But the pseudo-sciences, phrenology and the rest, seem 

 to me only appeals to weak minds and the weak points 

 of strong ones. There is a pica or false appetite in 

 many intelligences ; they take to odd fancies in place of 

 wholesome truth, as girls gnaw at chalk and charcoal. 

 Phrenology juggles with nature. It is so adjusted 

 as to soak up all evidence that helps it, and shed all 

 that harms it. It crawls forward in all weathers, like 

 Richard Edgeworth's hygrometer. It does not stand 

 at the boundary of our ignorance, it seems to me, but 

 is one of the will-o'-the-wisps of its undisputed central 

 domain of bog and quicksand. Yet I should not have 

 devoted so many words to it, did I not recognize the 

 light it has thrown on human actions by its study of 

 congenital organic tendencies. Its maps of the surface 



