A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



system has fallen through the exposition of peripatetic 

 charlatans should not make us forget that Dr. Gall 

 himself was apparently a highly educated physician, a 

 careful student of the brain and mind according to the 

 best light of his time, and, withal, an earnest and honest 

 believer in the validity of the system he had originated. 

 The system itself, taken as a whole, was hopelessly 

 faulty, yet it was not without its latent germ of truth, 

 as later studies were to show. How firmly its author 

 himself believed in it is evidenced by the paper which 

 he contributed to the French Academy of Sciences in 

 1808. The paper itself was referred to a committee of 

 which Pinel and Cuvier were members. The verdict of 

 this committee was adverse, and justly so ; yet the sys- 

 tem condemned had at least one merit which its de- 

 tractors failed to realize. It popularized the conception 

 that the brain is the organ of mind. Moreover, by 

 its insistence it rallied about it a band of scientific sup- 

 porters, chief of whom was Dr. Kaspar Spurzheim, a 

 man of no mean abilities, who became the propagan- 

 dist of phrenology in England and in America. Of 

 course such advocacy and popularity stimulated op- 

 position as well, and out of the disputations thus aris- 

 ing there grew presently a general interest in the brain 

 as the organ of mind, quite aside from any preconcep- 

 tions whatever as to the doctrines of Gall and Spurz- 

 heim. 



Prominent among the unprejudiced class of workers 

 who now appeared was the brilliant young Frenchman 

 Louis Antoine Desmoulins, who studied first under the 

 tutorage of the famous Magendie, and published jointly 

 with him a classical work on the nervous system of 



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