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As the excavators cleared on through the mass of ruin, they found the skeleton of a man literally severed in two by a prostrate column; the skull was of so striking a conformation, so boldly marked in its intellectual as well as its worse physical developments, that it has excited the constant speculation of every itinerant believer in the theories of Spurzheim who has gazed upon that ruined palace of the mind.
Still, in that famous work of his, Lavater not only treats of the various faces of men, but also attentively studies the faces of horses, birds, serpents, and fish; and dwells in detail upon the modifications of expression discernible therein. Nor have Gall and his disciple Spurzheim failed to throw out some hints touching the phrenological characteristics of other beings than man.
Duelling was still a possibility; so much so that when two medicals fell to fisticuffs in Adam Square, it was seriously hinted that single combat would be the result. Last and most wonderful of all, Gall and Spurzheim were in every one's mouth; and the Law student, after having exhausted Byron's poetry and Scott's novels, informed the ladies of his belief in phrenology.
Being thus incapable of minuteness, accuracy and certainty, it cannot be considered a proper and sufficient basis for cerebral science. In the hands of Gall and Spurzheim, it had already very nearly attained its limits as regards the subdivision of organs, and the progress of their followers in discovery has been unimportant or fallacious.
Gall, Spurzheim, and Lavater, and remark his sallow face, attenuated by base excesses! Do you know any forehead so broad which means so little? the oyster could teach this man philosophy! His chin is sharp, his eyes are blank blue, his short black hair curls over his ears, and his beard is of a prickly black, with a moustache which does not help his general contemptibleness.
Still, in that famous work of his, Lavater not only treats of the various faces of men, but also attentively studies the faces of horses, birds, serpents, and fish; and dwells in detail upon the modifications of expression discernible therein. Nor have Gall and his disciple Spurzheim failed to throw out some hints touching the phrenological characteristics of other beings than man.
All of these new organs and faculties have been discovered, demonstrated and studied since 1835, my first discoveries, which included a great portion of the whole, having been made by the cranioscopic method of Gall and Spurzheim, in which I found no difficulty in detecting the errors of my predecessors, and discovering the truths which are so patent to one who seeks them.
This tendency may be observed in the study of Physiology, especially when it is combined with that of Phrenology and Animal Magnetism; not that there is any necessary or strictly logical connection between these studies and Materialism, for some of their ablest expounders, including Cabanis, Gall, and Spurzheim, have explicitly disavowed that theory; but simply that, in prosecuting such inquiries, the mind is insensibly led to bestow an undue, if not exclusive, attention on the phenomena and laws of our material organization, so as to become comparatively unmindful of what is mental, moral, and spiritual in the constitution of man.
I wonder if the picture of the brain is there, "approved" by a noted Phrenologist, which was copied from my, the Professor's, folio plate in the work of Gall and Spurzheim.
Leslie's and having the eyebrows themselves lifted up at their exterior ends quite out of the usual line, a peculiarity which Spurzheim had remarked in the countenances of almost all the great mathematical or calculating geniuses such, for example, if I rightly remember, as Sir Isaac Newton himself, Kaestener, Euler, and many others.
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