THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 383 



able, travelling as he did to most of the prisons, mad-houses, and 

 hospitals of the Continent ; examining the habits and heads of 

 brutes innumerable for comparison ; and engaging M. Niklas, 

 Dr. Spurzheim, and others, for a pecuniary consideration, to work 

 under him and examine points for him, in the way of reading, 

 dissecting, casting, moulding, and observing living persons, 

 is astonishing k ; and the success and importance of his re- 

 searches will, I am satisfied, ensure him a place among the great- 

 est names of the human race, although, like every other great 

 discoverer and benefactor, he has been loaded with ridicule 

 and abuse. 1 His great anatomical discoveries were derided, and, 

 when this was possible no longer, given falsely to his predecessors, 

 or contemporaries, or have been given even to later writers. 

 Some have been announced by others, lately, as new, and are even 

 contended for by different individuals. Few anatomists and phy- 

 siologists have any idea of the errors as to facts and of the poverty 

 of argument displayed by Cuvier, Tiedemann, Pinel, Esquirol, 



k 1. c. 8vo. t. iii. p. 137. sqq. 172. sq. 206. sq. 



1 Mr. (now Lord) Jeffrey, in a violent article in his Edinburgh Review for 1815, 

 after glancing at an English work by Dr. Spurzheim, wrote off-hand an article 

 against it, and declared " the whole doctrines, anatomical, physiological, and phy- 

 siognomical, to be a piece of thorough quackery from beginning to end," "there 

 being nothing so impossible but mountebanks will undertake, nothing so in- 

 credible but they will affirm," "that to enter on a particular refutation, would 

 be to insult the understanding of readers," as Gall's opinion "on the functions 

 in general of man, and on his intellectual faculties in particular, are a collection 

 of mere absurdities, without truth, connection, or consistency; an incoherent 

 rhapsody, which nothing could have induced any man to have presented to the 

 public under a pretence of instructing them, but absolute insanity, gross igno- 

 rance, or matchless assurance." " Such is the trash,'* he continued, " the des- 

 picable trumpery, which men, calling themselves scientific inquirers, have the 

 impudence gravely to present to physiologists of the nineteenth century as speci- 

 mens of reasoning and induction." A clergyman, afterwards chaplain to a 

 Royal Hospital, and now a dignitary, at the same time wrote an article in a 

 less violent strain in the Quarterly Review, in which he styled phrenology " sheer 

 nonsense, and Dr. Spurzheim a fool." (No. xxv.) A year before they had called 

 Gall " an ignorant and interested quack; " and Blackwood's Magazine, in April, 

 1817, foretold that " phrenology would be forgotten as soon as Dr. Spurzheim 

 left Edinburgh :" just as, when Der Freischutz was first played in London, the 

 Literary Gazette, which, like so many other learned periodicals, has always spurned 

 phrenology, pronounced that, if the Germans were delighted with such music, 

 they must be more easily satisfied than Englishmen ; that it was " extremely 

 ineffective ;" and they " much doubted if there be a single air in it likely to 

 become popular." (July 24. 1824. No. 392.) 



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