83 



allusion to GalPs views, as they have not met with anything 

 like general acceptance ; but although his conclusions must be 

 considered in many instances arbitrary and hypothetical^, still I 

 would say, ''Let not the spark be lost in the flame it has 

 served to kindle/^ for, in spite of all that has been said against 

 Gall and all that has been written in depreciation of his labours, 

 beyond all doubt his researches gave an impulse to the cerebral 

 localization of our faculties, the effect of which is especially 

 visible in our own days ; and I look upon his work as an im- 

 perishable monument to the genius and industry of one of the 

 greatest philosophers of the present age. 



GalPs labours would undoubtedly have met with a more 

 hearty recognition from his contemporaries, had not the 

 Austrian priesthood raised the cry of '' materialism as applied 

 to his doctrines. The great German psychologist had no such 

 heterodox notions as his adversaries maliciously attributed to 

 him, for, as Hufeland philosophically observes, " he was em- 

 ployed in analyzing the dust of the earth of which man is formed, 

 not the breath of life which was breathed into his nostrils/^ 



As in GalFs days so in ours, this very indefinite and unmean- 

 ing word ^'materialism'^ is used as a kind of psychological 

 scarecrow, to frighten all those who are endeavouring to trace 

 the connection between matter and mind. Surely there is 

 nothing contrary to sound theology in assigning certain attri- 

 butes or functions of an intellectual order to certain parts of our 

 nervous centre ; the cerebral localization of our divers faculties, 

 and the plurality of our cerebral organs, strike no blow at the 

 great principle of the moral unity of man. The same power 

 that caused the earth, " like a spark from the incandescent mass 

 of unformed matter, hammered from the anvil of Omnipotence, 

 to be smitten off into space,^^ this same power, surely, could 

 just as well ordain that a multiplicity of organs should be neces- 

 sary to the full development of man^s mental faculties, as that 

 the manifestation of them should depend upon the integrity of 

 one single organ. 



Although not the next theory in chronological order, it is con- 

 venient here to make a passing allusion to the views of a Dutch 

 physiologist. Professor Schroeder Van Der Kolk, who placed 

 the seat of speech in the olivary bodies. Besides citing nume- 

 rous cases in illustration of his hypothesis, he gives an a priori 

 reason for his theory in the fact, that the olivary bodies occur only 

 in mammalia; that, on comparing these organs as occurring 

 in mammals themselves, they are most developed in man, and 

 that in the higher mammalia, as the ape, they are most like 

 those in man. This hypothesis, which has never met with 



