THE STOHY OF NINETEENTH -CENTURY SCIENCE 



liever 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 Science 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 propagandist 

 of phrenology in England and in America. Of course 

 such advocacy and popularity stimulated opposition as 

 well, and out of the disputations thus arising there grew 

 presently a general interest in the brain as the organ of 

 mind, quite aside from any preconceptions whatever as 

 to the doctrines of Gall and Spurzheim. 



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 ver- 

 tebrates in 1825. Desmoulins made at least one discov- 

 ery of epochal importance. He observed that the brains 

 of persons dying in old age were lighter than the aver- 

 age, and gave visible evidence of atrophy, and he rea- 

 soned that such decay is a normal accompaniment of 

 senility. No one nowadays would question the accu- 

 racy of this observation, but the scientific world was 



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