[December, 
748 Analyses of Books. 
Among the proceedings at the Mason College Union a memoir 
on the Phrenology of Gall must not be overlooked. The essayist, 
Mr. Barwise, brought forward some very strong points against 
that localisation of the mental faculties which some forty years 
ago had so many adherents. He remarked that little men with 
big heads are generally the most intelleftual. This reminds us 
of the Byronian couplet : — 
“ Tall men are oft like houses that are tall, 
The upper rooms worst furnished are of all.” 
We doubt, however, whether the intelle&ual superiority of little 
men could be demonstrated statistically. 
On another occasion Mr. Greatheed moved the resolution, 
ultra-heretical in the latitude of Birmingham, that “ compulsory 
education is an obstacle to ind’vidual development.” As a matter 
of course he was defeated by a large majority. It may, indeed, 
be asked whether the suppression of individuality towards which 
we are hastening, in imitation of the Chinese, is due to the mere 
facft that education is compulsory, or to other of its features, — 
to wit, its examinationism and its “ standardism.” We utterly 
protest against the assertion of Mr. Ledsam, that “ as to the 
upper classes examinations are beneficial unless the student 
crams.” Mr. Greatheed’s views, in our opinion, deserve to be 
reproduced before a wider public and to be carefully considered. 
“ Vox Clamantis in Deserto ” writes concerning the wild spe- 
culations of Mr. George and his followers. “ Vox ” overlooks, 
however, the wildest : — “ That the earth could maintain a 
thousand billions of people as easily as a thousand millions is a 
necessary deduction from the manifest truth that, at least so far 
as our agency is concerned, matter is eternal, and force must for 
ever continue to a 61.” Matter may be eternal, but it is not infi- 
nite in quantity. We venture to say that there is not in our 
globe combined nitrogen enough for the bodies of a thousand 
billion human beings, and at the same time for the animals and 
plants upon which they must feed, and for the various animal 
and vegetable parasites which, so far, we have not been able to 
take even the first step towards extirpating. Before the earth 
maintains one billion of people in any other state than chronic 
misery, we must be able to form ammonia on remunerative terms 
from the nitrogen of the atmosphere, to control the weather, and 
to exterminate rats, mice, locusts, house-flies, the Phylloxera , 
the Pteronospora , the Hemileia, and a host of our animal and 
vegetable rivals in the strife for food. These points, if ever 
efledted, will be due to the quiet labours of the physicist, the 
chemist, and the biologist, and not to the political agitator. 
