Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/608

604 study of character that ever gained a temporary foothold, it seems proper to consider the nature of its pretensions and their following. Propagandists have an enviable if perilous vigor and enthusiasm—an element of reckless abandon not unrelated to the extravagances of mania in the exaggeration and self-deception which it entails. Lavater had the simpler problem of collecting drawings and engravings in imposing array to enforce the principles of physiognomy. Gall collected skulls and casts, and induced persons with marked mental peculiarities to have their heads shaven so that their replicas in plaster might be at his service. He asked that

The critical peril of false theories lies in their applications. Gall’s interests seem to have remained for the most part scientific and objective; but in association with Spurzheim, whose direction of the phrenological movement largely determined its course, they took a more practical turn, and therein found their degradation. The extension of the phrenological principle to races and animals as a zoological problem appealed to Gall. He tells with ludicrous if pathetic simplicity of his baffling attempt to interpret the prominence of a part of the cranium which monkeys and women have in common. Finally,

Thus was the cranial localization of “love of offspring” discovered.

Phrenology similarly offered the clue to racial differences.

It was seriously set forth that the dog, the ape and the ox do not sing because the shape of their heads shows the absence of the faculties for music; that the thrush or the nightingale had heads with developed musical faculties, and the hawk and the owl lacked these parts; that in the male nightingale or mocking bird the head was square, angular, and more prominent above the eyes, while in the female these parts were conical, thus endowing the male and not the female with the gift of song. “Observe the narrow forehead of the dog, the ape, the badger, the horse, in comparison with the square forehead of man, and you will have the solution of the problem why these animals are neither