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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 modem 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. 
For the word soul, substitute speech, and for lyre, substitute 
brain. The instrument, i. 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 
