Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/501

Rh layer of the skull. So that an observer could no more accurately construct a phrenological chart of an elephant than he could diagnose the contents of a warehouse by scanning the exterior of the building.

Not merely, however, are the difficulties of phrenology limited to the lower animals. Suppose we make a cross-section of a human skull through either the right or left side of the forehead, about half an inch above the upper border of the orbit or eye cavity. We may then discover that man as well as the elephant possesses "frontal sinuses" or air-spaces in his forehead-bone of considerable extent intervening between the exterior of the skull and the contained brain. Now, in such a section of the human skull, what phrenological "organs" shall we cut through? Certainly those of "individuality," "form," "size," and "color." In placing such organs across the eyebrows, the phrenologist might naturally be regarded as having proceeded on the assumption that he was mapping out on the exterior of the skull a certain part of the brain-surface. What shall be said of his procedure, however, when the reader learns that a section of the skull made as indicated through these organs shows that they—i. e., the "organs" as marked on the outside of the skull—overlie the hollow spaces or "frontal sinuses," and are actually separated from the brain by cavities of considerable extent, in some cases exceeding an inch? Such a demonstration truly speaks for itself, and no less so does the anatomist's discovery that the "organ" of phrenologists known as "form" actually reposes in anything but a noble position on the cavity of the nose; that the organ of "calculation" is a solid bony (orbital) process; and that the size of the organ of "language" really depends upon the want of forward projection of the eye depending on the special development of a bony process on which the organ of sight rests, and which in any case has nothing whatever to do with the brain. Of language more anon; but enough has been said to show that a connection with the brain is not an invariable or apparently necessary condition for the construction of a phrenological "organ" of the mind—the fact that the brain is the organ of mind notwithstanding.

But neither does the case for phrenology fare any better when it is tested by the results of the examination of crania belonging to persons whose family or personal history was well known, and whose characters, in respect of their thorough and stable formation, would therefore serve as a test of phrenological or any other system of mind-explanation. In the heyday of phrenological discussion, and in Edinburgh as the very focus and center of the arguments pro and con the system of Gall and Spurzheim, a Mr. Stone, then President of the Royal Medical Society, read in 1829 a paper in which the results of a most laborious and conscientious series of observations on the crania of well-known persons were detailed. These results, as will presently be shown, were fatal to any ideas which might have been entertained regarding the authentic nature of the data on which phrenological observations were founded.