90 



fetched to illustrate a subject by allusion to a work written 500 

 years before the Christian era, I may add that such cases have 

 been met with by modern observers. My friend Mr. Dunn 

 has recorded a similar one, and I myself was recently requested 

 to see a man who had suddenly become speechless. The sus- 

 pension of the power of speech was unaccompanied by any 

 symptom of paralysis, and the loss of the faculty of articulate 

 language continued for six days, when, being asleep on his 

 couch, he suddenly started up, and was heard to say three 

 times, ^' A man in the river ! From this moment speech 

 was restored, and when I saw him an hour afterwards, he told 

 me that he had dreamed that a man was falling into the river. 

 The mental shock produced by this dream was salutary, for 

 it resuscitated the previously dormant faculty of articulate 

 language. 



Surely we cannot, for one moment, assume that in these 

 cases there can have been any structural lesion of the brain, 

 any material damage. 



But I may be told, — granted the truth of your statements, 

 surely you must admit that man speaks by and through his 

 brain. Most assuredly I do. I admit that a certain normal 

 and healthy state of cerebral tissue is necessary for the exterior 

 manifestation of the faculty of speech, but that is a very different 

 thing from saying that speech is located in this or that parti- 

 cular portion of the brain. Permit me to illustrate what I mean 

 by an allusion to a passage in Plato^s celebrated dialogue on 

 the Immortality of the Soul, where a disputant with Socrates 

 inquires if the soul is not like the harmony of a lyre, more 

 beautiful, more divine than the lyre itself, but yet is nothing 

 without the lyre, vanishing when this instrument is broken. 

 Eor the word soul, substitute speech, and for lyi'e, substitute 

 brain. The instrument, e. the brain, may be damaged, and 

 speech may become impossible, but that does not constitute the 

 brain the seat of speech, although it is undoubtedly the in- 

 strument by which this attribute becomes externally manifested. 



In conclusion, I desire it to be distinctly understood that I 

 deprecate all idea of dogmatically urging my views upon this 

 Society. I wish also to repeat that I entertain no preconceived 

 hostility, no prejudice whatever, against Mr. Darwin, and I 

 most certainly decline to be classed among those who would 

 reject the doctrine of evolution simply from any fancied 

 notion that its adoption is derogatory to man^s position in the 

 scheme of nature. Nor should I reject it on the ground of 

 any antagonism between it and the power of the Deity, for 

 the same Power that planned the glorious temple of Nature, 

 which has the earth for its emerald floor ; its roof the sapphire 



