398 MENTAL FUNCTIONS OF 



If these are facts, all objections on the score of fatalism 

 and materialism are unworthy of attention. Because no rational 



ashamed of it.' " (My Lumleyan Lectures on the Diseases of the Heart, referred 

 to supra, p. 174.) 



Father Pardies wrote against the experiments and what he was pleased to call the 

 hypotheses of Newton, the very words of uninformed antiphrenologists. Such 

 great astronomers and mathematicians as Cassini and Maraldi were calculating 

 the paths of comets on the most imaginary and unfounded hypotheses, long after 

 Halley had constructed tables on the principles of Newton, in which the motions 

 of all comets that ever had appeared or could appear might be easily deduced ; 

 and Voltaire remarks that, though Newton lived nearly forty years after the pub- 

 lication of his Principia, he had not twenty followers out of England at the time 

 of his death. Some great philosophers died in perfect ignorance of them. 



The introduction of Greek was originally opposed with violence at Oxford, 

 though now it is taught there as one of the most important things that a well 

 educated man can know. 



The music of Gall's countryman, Handel, though it has enraptured the English 

 for a century, is now only beginning to be appreciated in Germany. 



Even I have lived long enough to see things at once rejected with scorn, which 

 are now all but universally adopted. When Laennec first published his great 

 work, I procured a stethoscope and investigated his statements. Although the 

 facts of percussion, as detailed by Avenbrugger above half a century ago, must of 

 physical necessity exist, I had always been taught, by the first teacher of medicine 

 in London, at Guy's Hospital, Dr. James Curry, that they were fallacies, and 

 they were dismissed in three minutes as unworthy of the slightest attention. 

 Education, therefore, tended to make me sceptical. But I soon found that 

 Avenbrugger had been disgracefully neglected in this country j and that Laennec, 

 like Avenbrugger, had opened to us a new and extensive scene in disease, to 

 which, though it had always existed, we were blind that we had eyes and saw 

 not or really, to drop metaphor, that we had ears and heard not. For a length 

 of time I found some at St. Thomas's treat percussion and auscultation with 

 ridicule; some with absolute indignation ; and others, for years, treated it with 

 silent contempt ; who all, I am happy to say, now practise both. I was there- 

 fore in the habit of studying them in the wards alone, and at hours when I 

 expected to be unobserved. When I at length advocated and taught them in the 

 school, one of my colleagues, I heard, pronounced it nonsense or worse in his 

 lecture ; and at the College of Physicians I heard a senior fellow, in a Croonian 

 lecture, denounce the folly of carrying a piece of wood (some called the 

 stethoscope inutile lignum) into sick chambers and making observations, to the 

 destruction of all philosophical and dignified views, such as become men whose 

 minds have been enlarged by the education which Oxford and Cambridge afford. 

 When another fellow of the College was asked his opinion of auscultation in the 

 wards of his hospital, he at once, as I was informed by the gentleman who 

 asked the question, condemned it as nonsense ; and when told " that Elliotson 

 assured his friends that he had a high opinion of it and made his diagnosis of 

 affections of the chest with infinitely more accuracy by its means," he replied, 



