Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/500

484 be regarded as dealing rather with the results of the disposition of the white matter than with that of the gray—and this latter assumption of necessity involves a second, namely, that phrenology has no status as a science of mind at all.

There is one consideration concerning the practical application of the phrenologist's assertions too important to be over-looted, namely, the difficulty of detecting or of mapping out on the living head the various "bumps" or organs of mind which appear to be so lucidly localized on the bust or chart. The observer, who might naturally think the determination of the "bumps" an easy matter, has but to try to reconcile with a phrenological chart, or with the brain-surface itself (Fig. 1), the configuration of a friend's cranium, and he will then discover the impossibility of distinguishing where one faculty or organ ends and where another begins. How, for instance, can the exact limits of the four or five organs of mind, to be hereafter alluded to more specifically, which are supposed to exist in the line of the eyebrow, be determined? What is the criterion of excessive or inferior development here, and how may we know when one "encroaches" upon another to the exclusion or atrophy of the latter? The practical application of phrenology indeed constitutes one of its difficulties; and added to the difficulty or impossibility of accurately mapping out the boundaries of the phrenologist's organs, we must take into account the fact that we are expected to detail these organs through, in any case, a considerable thickness of scalp, which veils and occludes, as every anatomist knows, the intimate conformation of the skull-cap. At the most the phrenologist may distinguish regions; his exact examination of the living head à la phrenological chart or bust is an anatomical impossibility.

But the anatomist has also something of importance to say regarding the actual existence of certain of the "organs" of mind mapped out by the phrenologist. Leaning trustfully upon their empirical deductions, the phrenologists have frequently localized faculties and organs of mind upon bony surfaces separated from the brain by an intervening space of considerable kind. In so far as comparative anatomy is concerned, phrenology receives no assistance in its attempt to localize mind-functions in man. An elephant is admittedly a sagacious animal, with a brain worth studying; just as a cat or tiger presents us with a disposition in which, if brain-science is applicable, as it should be, to lower forms of life exhibiting special traits of character, destructiveness should be well represented and typically illustrated. Alas for phrenology! the bump of destructiveness in the feline races resolves itself into a mass of jaw-muscles, and the elephant's brain is placed certainly not within a foot or so of the most skillful of phrenological digits. The "frontal sinuses" or great air-spaces in the forehead bones of the animal intervene between the front of the brain, the region par excellence of intellect according to phrenology, and the outside