THE OLD AND THE NEW PHRENOLOGY. 745 



hear the question, you think of the answer, and you say it. Each 

 of them has been separately measured, and takes from one tenth 

 to one sixth of a second, so that the entire process requires from 

 three tenths to one half of a second to complete it. People differ 

 widely from one another in this rapidity of action, and the same 

 person differs much at different times, and the explanation of this 

 difference is found in the inherent power of activity in the brain. 

 The effect of wine is to make these acts slower. The action as a 

 whole calls into activity several parts of the brain, the nerve from 

 the organ of sense to the brain, the part receiving the sensation, 

 the tract from it to the motor area, and the part of that area which 

 initiates the impulse and guides the movement and the nerve 

 thence to the muscles. It is not surprising, therefore, that it 

 should take some time ; the astonishing thing is really the rapidity 

 with which the brain acts, for modern measurements extend to 

 thousandths of a second, and some mental processes in rapid brains 

 take only a few hundredths of a second to be completed. Famil- 

 iarity with a certain act lessens the time it requires. A lady was 

 heard to say the other day, in alluding to the acting of the French 

 comedians who have recently been seen here, that it was surpris- 

 ing how much faster French people talked than Americans. She 

 would have thought it an act lacking in courtesy had it been in- 

 sisted upon that it was not because they really talked faster, but 

 because her English-speaking brain refused to think as rapidly in 

 French, that had led her to the conclusion. Yet such was the fact. 



There is one more process of mental activity to which allusion 

 must be made, as it has thrown much light upon the theory of 

 localization, and has now been fully explained by that theory — 

 viz., the power of speech. There is perhaps no mental process 

 which brings us more closely to the point of meeting of the physi- 

 cal and mental elements of the mind. 



Language is so complex, as we survey it and as we constantly 

 use it, that it seems at first impossible to unravel all its mys- 

 teries. But, if we watch its growth, we can get at some facts of 

 not a little interest. Let us trace the way in which a baby learns 

 its first word.* As the baby looks about him he begins after a 

 time to distinguish faces, and one face, his mother's, being con- 

 stantly near, soon becomes most familiar. Mothers are constantly 

 talking to their babies, and always speak of themselves as " mam- 

 ma " or " mother," never using " I " or " me." After a time the 

 baby begins to notice this sound " mamma " and to recognize it, 

 and then the fact that a certain face and a certain sound usually 

 come together finally establishes a fixed association between the 

 sight-picture and the sound-picture, so that the one when brought 

 to mind brings up the other. Then, if you ask the baby, " Where 



* Preyer, " The Mind of the Child," D. Appleton & Co., 1888. 



