672 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



Gracchi, will come to you and hold out the hand for alms. The mildest man- 

 nered man I ever knew, a man who I think would not knowingly harm man or 

 beast, carried through life the face of a hawk. 'One of the most determined men 

 I ever knew had a nose as pug as the variest child of fickleness. Yet reasoning 

 a priori, we would expect that inasmuch as the muscles of the face are used to 

 express the passions, the frequency of their action would cause a muscular growth 

 by which the predominant passion would become marked there permanently. 

 But some faces seem to be masks or puzzles; some faces like Talleyrand's words 

 are made to conceal thoughts and vices. But in this connection some facts show 

 that the fault may be more in the reading than in the face. The main feature of 

 the mesmeric state is that the subject for the time being loses his will power and 

 becomes a human automaton, obeying outward impressions. If, when in this 

 state, you tell him that he cannot bend his arm, he cannot do it ; if you tell him 

 that there is fruit growing upon the icy street, the mere suggestion will cause him 

 to see it, and make endeavors to reach it. Place his head then in the position 

 denoting pride, and he will immediately display the feeling; contort his face until 

 the muscles convey the impression of anger and he will show mental 'signs of 

 rage. The mere action of the muscles upon the brain has suggested these feel- 

 ings to the nerve-centers in the inverse order from that in which they are usually 

 presented. Position then, and feature, must be intimately associated with the 

 manifestation of character, and if we cannot read it aright the fault must be our 

 own. 



But there is something more in knowing humanity than the mere ability to 

 readjndividual character. If phrenology had really given us what it pretended, 

 a key bytwhich every man's character might be read and his actions in any par- 

 ticular case predicted, the central features of the problem would still remain un- 

 assailed. We should be very little nearer to knowing man in the abstract — to 

 knowing how the brain uses itself, as a measure or. a weight. We are still upon 

 the outside, watching the effects produced by the machine. Spurzheim, it is true, 

 made an important step in dissecting the brain when he divided it from below 

 upward, showing that the white fibrous matter passed up from the periphery of 

 the body and ended in the grey matter of the cortex, but there the matter ended 

 with him. Whether he thought that sufficient to prove the truth of his teaching 

 or not I can not say. But like every new discovery it was simply a door opened 

 by which a hundred doubts rushed in. 



After his time a strange activity awoke in scientific circles. Men interested 

 in knowing what life was, men who could think and who tried to lay aside their 

 prejudices, began to question nature by experiment. Not one man alone, but a 

 hundred applied the interrogation, striving to arrive at the truth from differ- 

 ent directions, and to counteract one prejudice by another. In the course of 

 these experiments they learned some things that have materially changed our 

 views of the workings of the mind and the division of its faculties. And first to 

 understand these experiments we must start in with the postulate that it is impos- 

 sible for us to know anything about mind except with the brain as a basis. As 



