70 



THE NERVOUS SYSTEM 



be kept the species of sensitive things, and as 

 occasion serves, may be taken from thence." # 



And Gall, a century after Willis, had collected 

 and published, in support of his system of phren- 

 ology, many cases and post-mortem examinations 

 showing the differentiation of the work of the brain. 

 Gall is a warning for all time against the dangers 

 of deduction ; he had but one idea, and he drove it 

 to death ; but the clinical and pathological facts 

 which he amassed, in the hope of establishing a set 

 of doctrines out of all relation to facts, are as true 

 now as ever ; and, if he had been content to go the 

 way of induction, and to set himself to the accumu- 

 lation of facts, he might have become a great physi- 

 ologist. In his knowledge of the anatomy of the 

 brain, and in the dissection of the brain, he was far 

 ahead of the men of his time ; but he followed his 

 own imaginings, and left nothing that could last, 

 except those cases and pathological instances that 

 are buried in the ruins of his system. But there 

 they are, and are still of value. For example, Gall's 

 case of loss of speech, after an injury involving the 

 speech-centres, ought to have commanded the atten- 

 tion of all physiologists : but it came to nothing, 

 because he used it to support his doctrine of organs 

 and bumps, and it shared the fate of that doctrine. 

 Phrenology is gone past recall ; it died of that con- 



* For an account of Willis' work on the nervous system, see 

 Sir Victor Horsley's Fullerian Lectures, 1891. Willis was the 

 first, or one of the first, to recognise the fact that the cerebral 

 ventricles are nothing more than lymph-cavities. 



