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Willis school had as much trouble in disposing of this mild 
delusion as they had in setting forth positive discovery. 
The discoveries of Willis were indeed very grand when mea- 
sured by what they dispelled and by what they proved. That the 
brain was an organ of actual flesh and blood ; that it was nourished 
by blood, and was specially well supplied with blood ; that it 
was covered with membranes and divided into distinct parts ; 
that animals had brains built of the same matter as human, but 
of less magnificent quantity; and that the quality of mind 
had relation to the quality of brain with varying gradations 
through the scale of living organic being — these, in the rough, 
were certain of the gigantic truths taught by the dutiful and 
right loyal subject of Charles Mutton. 
Aeter Willis. G-all, and his Part. 
After Willis, the brain became a fine field of study for anato- 
mists of all schools ; but, with a few exceptions, anatomists have 
never been more than industrious men, painstakers, with some 
hard observance and little insight ; and so it happened that the 
poor brain, cut up after the fashion of cutting up a Dutch cheese, 
was subjected, long after it was discovered as an organ, to 
infinite anatomical torture and fearfully insulting misnomer. 
To this day, the names given to certain parts of the brain are 
painfully absurd : it is made to have valves and writers’ pens, 
fissures and roads, bridges and canals, beds, curtains and floors, 
hard bodies which are really soft, and white bodies which are 
not white, to say nothing of two approximate parts really not 
mentionable, even in simile, in polite society. At length the phy- 
sical metaphysical labours of Gall helped somewhat to render 
the study of the brain less nominal and less obscure. Gall, by his 
dissections, by his careful tracing out of the diverging fibres, 
and by his happy and, in many respects, correct and simple 
divisions of the organ into centres, placed observers on a train 
of research which was full of promise. Unfortunately his dis- 
ciples, not excluding the distinguished Spurtzheim, followed in 
the metaphysical direction to which their master had led them, 
rather than to the physical. This tendency was in every sense 
natural. It was the continuous road of enquiry, much widened 
and more soundly paved, while the physical highway was doubt- 
ful from its newness, and especially from the labour- demanded 
for traversing it. The metaphysical path was luxurious, open, 
and tempting even to fascination ; the physical was hard, narrow, 
and unpromising, nay threatening, to the beholder. Thus 
sprang up the system of Phrenology, a system in advance of 
facts, and therefore, though containing many truths, a system 
based largely on belief, and fluctuating as belief itself. 
