796 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



told her his age. "When she said " Sixty," he answered in the affrma- 

 tive. Some months afterward he suddenly became paralyzed on the 

 right side, and a few months later died from an attack of apoplexy. 

 His brain was found extensively diseased in the white portion of the 

 anterior lobe of the left hemisphere. 



This case was purely and simply an impairment of external speech. 

 On looking over the medical literature on the subject I have been un- 

 able to find as striking a case of impairment of internal speech, and 

 this fact can be readily understood when we consider that a lesion 

 necessary to produce this condition would be a destruction of the gray 

 or cortical matter of the brain, and when this is injured the whole in- 

 tellect becomes disjointed, as we see in the maniac, where the simple 

 mechanical power of speech is perfect, but the incoherency and the 

 wrong interpretation of external impressions are evident. I have said 

 that these cases of the derangement of the faculties of internal speech 

 are chiefly found in lunatic asylums. But, when I think, I remember 

 to have met many mild cases outside of asylums, cases which can be 

 best described by our Americanism of " talking too much with their 

 mouth." 



I have said the faculty of speech resides in the anterior lobes of the 

 brain. But the evidence gleaned from pathology is convincing that 

 the faculty is confined to a comparatively limited portion of the fron- 

 tal lobe of the left cerebral hemisphere. This localization of a func- 

 tion to a single side of the brain is a curiously interesting fact. But 

 when it is known that the left side of the brain presides over the mo- 

 tions and sensations of the right side of the body, it may be conceived 

 that because we are right-handed we are left-minded. Why we are 

 right-handed involves a discussion which would be beyond the limits 

 of the present essay. But that the left side of the brain is almost 

 always larger than the right is a well-known fact, and this asymmetry 

 of the encephalon was prominently brought before the public during 

 the Guiteau trial, with its prominent, ghastly rhombo-cephalic. 



A curiously complicated and wonderful adaptation is this faculty 

 of speech, sometimes bearing weighty loads of truth, at other times 

 the veriest dregs of gorged society — words, windy words. The high- 

 est and best result of education is to form our ideas into words, to 

 crystallize them into speech. We all feel that here we fail. Our 

 thoughts well up and almost burst their limits, but faulty speech will 

 not give the color and glow which the soul infuses into the thoughts. 

 We can all say with the poet : 



" Our whitest pearls we never find, 

 Our ripest fruit we never reach ; 

 The flowering moments of the mind 

 Drop half their petals in our speech." 



