allusion to Gall's 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. 
Gall's 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 hi& 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 Gall's 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 
