Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/498

482 maintains the actuality of his deductions respecting the "organs" of mind, and it is only a fair and just expectation that, if the brain be a congeries of such organs, the anatomist should be able to see these parts as development has revealed them. The nature of the brain is asserted by the phrenologist to exist in its composition as a set of organs. That nature, argues the anatomist, if revealed at all, should present itself in its development, which alone can show us nature's true fashion of building a brain. What, therefore, is the result of the anatomist's study of the manner in which the brain is fashioned? The answer is found in the statement that there is not a trace of a single "organ" such as the phrenologist theoretically maintains is represented in the brain. There is no division into separate parts and portions, as the phrenologist's chart would lead the observer to suppose. The scalpel of the anatomist can nowhere discover in the full-grown brain an organ of veneration, or of hope, or of language, or of destructiveness, or of any other mental feature: nor can his microscope detect in nature's wondrous process of fashioning the brain any reason for the belief that the organ of mind is a collection of parts each devoted to the exercise of a special quality of mind. The arrangement which appears so clear on the phrenologist's bust is nowhere represented in the brain itself. And the organs of the phrenologist, in so far as their existence is concerned, may not inaptly be described in Butler's words as being

But if development gives no support to the phrenological assertion of the brain's division into organs of the mind, neither does anatomy, human and comparative, countenance its tenets as applied to the examination of the brain-pan itself. To select a very plain method of testing the deductions of phrenology, let an anatomical plate of the upper surface of the undisturbed brain be exhibited, and, having settled the position of certain "organs" from a phrenological chart, let any one try to discover if the limits of any one organ can be discerned on the brain-surface. He will then clearly appreciate the hopeless nature of the task he has undertaken, and be ready to shrink from the attempt to resolve the complex convolutions before him into a square inch here of one faculty, or a square inch there of another. Moreover, one very important consideration will dawn upon the reflective mind which considers that the convolutions of the brain are not limited to the crown and sides of the head, but, on the contrary, extend over the entire surface of the cerebrum, and are developed on its base (see Fig. 2). No phrenologist has attempted, it is true, to get at the base of the brain by inspecting the palate; but it would be regarded as an absurd and unwarrantable statement to assert that the base of the brain has no functions, and that the mind of man is located only at the top and on the sides of the head. Yet the phrenologist is in the position of one