Chap. XXV.] PHRENOLOGY: OLD AND NEW.. 613 



brain, so that one of the anterior ventricles they made the seat of 

 common sensation, the other of" the imaginative faculty, the third 

 ventricle was the seat of the understanding, and the fourth of 

 memory." This doctrine was also maintained by Duns Scotus, 

 Thomas Aquinas, and other theologians. And as late as the first half 

 of the seventeenth century, " Descartes maintained that the animal 

 spirits were secreted from the brain through pores opening into the 

 ventricles, and that there accumulating, the slightest disturbance 

 of them excites the soul seated in the pineal gland ; and contrarily, 

 that the animal spirits in the ventricles are moved by the will 

 acting through the pineal gland, and distributed thence through 

 the nerves to all parts of the body*." 



But about the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the 

 seventeenth century, Casper Bauhin, Yarolius, Spigelius and other 

 anatomists, had been striving to show, in opposition to Galen, that 

 the ventricles of the brain are not the factories and storehouses 

 of the 'animal spirits,' and that they are more properly to I'C 

 regarded as " accidental structures which have no other use than to 

 receive the excreta and residuum formed during the nutrition of 

 the brain, and in the production of the animal spirits, and to pass 

 them away through the infundibulum to the fauces." 



After it had been fully agreed that the ' animal spirits ' are not 

 generated in the ventricles of the brain, nor produced in the 

 substance of the brain to be collected in the ventricles, it was still 

 generally believed that these cavities were receptacles for effete 

 matters, which discharged themselves principally into the nostrils 

 through the ethmoid bone and through certain imaginary ducts 

 indicated by Galen, and much later by Vesalius, as passing from the 

 pituitary gland and through the sphenoid bone to the fauces. 

 This view had, therefore, in its turn, to be overthrown, and 0. V. 

 Schneider (1655) did much in this direction. Lower, Willis, and 

 others, also became convinced that nothing could pass from the 

 ventricles to the nostrils in the way specified; they thought, never- 

 theless, " that the serum of the ventricles passed through the infun- 

 dibulum to the pituitary gland, and thence through peculiar ducts 

 to the jugular veins, where it was mixed with the blood." Haller 



* Even towards the end of the last century, a celebrated anato- 

 mist, Sommering, announced his belief that the fluid of the ven- 

 tricles of the brain was the real sensorvmn commune and proper 

 organ of Mind. 



