74 
POPULAE SCIENCE EEYIEW. 
such special interest. The authors aim. has been clear throughout, and, 
although he explains it in the preface, it is perfectly clear to those who 
understand anything of the science. His object has, as he says, been “to 
exhibit the scientific connection of the various steps by which our knowledge 
of the phenomena of heat has been extended.” Thus, for instance, first of 
all, the thermometer, or the measurement of heat ; then the calorimeter ; then 
“the investigation of those relations between the thermal and the mechanical 
properties of substances which form the subject of thermodynamics.” Then 
follow chapters on the Dissipation of Energy, and on the hypothesis that the 
motion of the molecule constitutes the heat of bodies. There is certainly a 
good deal to be discussed, as Dr. Maxwell treats them, in the space of a 
small manual. We can therefore understand why the author has been 
obliged to omit many other questions in the science of heat. But we do 
not think that he was quite right in doing so in a book intended especially 
for the working class, and we cannot quite congratulate him on the result, 
excellent though we admit it to be. 
PHRENOLOGY. * 
O F the works which have been published on this subject for the last few 
years, the present one is at once the most presumptuous and the most 
ignorant. Since the time of Gall and Spurzheim there have been very 
few, with the exception of Dr. Combe, who have attempted a scientific 
argument for phrenology ; and of all the writers who have since touched 
the subject, we fancy the author of the present treatise is at once the most 
presumptuous and the most ignorant of all those purely scientific data on 
which the argument for phrenology should rest. If ever a subject required 
an intimate acquaintance not only with anatomy and physiology, but with 
insanity in its every phase, assuredly that subject is phrenology. But these 
subjects have virtually no place in the present volume. We do not deny 
phrenology in the abstract. There may, of course, be such a thing as an 
organ of the brain for special faculties, but assuredly no such organ has as 
yet been made out. Indeed there has been a search of late for an organ of 
speech, which is supposed to lie in the anterior part of the cerebral mass ; but 
as yet, though much valuable matter has been written upon the subject, it 
is not yet clearly shown whether it is in the right or the left half of the 
brain that it is situate. And assuredly there is no further attempt at a 
specialisation of the brain’s functions. Even that at one time supposed func- 
tion of the cerebellum is now thrown into very serious doubt. If there was 
the least shadow of scientific method about the book, we should have 
attempted a slight notice of it ; but there is really nothing in its pages which 
would satisfy the merest tyro in medical science. It is a miserable attempt 
to justify a department of scientific thought which, whatever may have 
been the claims of its first originators, has now dwindled down to the very 
* “ Phrenology, and How to Use it in Analysing Character.” By Nicholas 
Morgan. London : Longmans & Co., 1871. 
