brain
flower out into a corolla of marrowy filaments, as Vieussens had done
before him, and to hear the dry-fibred but human-hearted George Combe
teach good sense under the disguise of his equivocal system. But the
pseudo-sciences, phrenology and the rest, seem to me only appeals to weak
minds and the weak points of strong ones. There is a pica or false
appetite in many intelligences; they take to odd fancies in place of
wholesome truth, as girls gnaw at chalk and charcoal. Phrenology juggles
with nature. It is so adjusted as to soak up all evidence that helps it,
and shed all that harms it. It crawls forward in all weathers, like
Richard Edgeworth's hygrometer. It does not stand at the boundary of our
ignorance, it seems to me, but is one of the will-o'-the-wisps of its
undisputed central domain of bog and quicksand. Yet I should not have
devoted so many words to it, did I not recognize the light it has thrown
on human actions by its study of congenital organic tendencies. Its maps
of the surface of the head are, I feel sure, founded on a delusion, but
its studies of individual character are always interesting and
instructive.

The "snapping-turtle" strikes after its natural fashion when it first
comes out of the egg. Children betray their tendencies in their way of
dealing with the breasts that nourish them; nay, lean venture to affirm,
that long before they are born they teach their mothers something of
their turbulent or quiet tempers.

"Castor gaudet equis, ovo proanatus eodem
Pugnis."

Strike out the false pretensions of phrenology; call it anthropology; let
it study man the individual in distinction from man the abstraction, the
metaphysical or theological lay-figure; and it becomes "the proper study
of mankind," one of the noblest and most interesting of pursuits.

The whole physiology of the nervous system, from the simplest
manifestation of its power in an insect up to the supreme act of the
human intelligence working through the brain, is full of the most
difficult yet profoundly interesting questions. The singular relations
between electricity and nerve-force, relations which it has been
attempted to interpret as meaning identity, in the face of palpable
differences, require still more extended studies. You may be interested
by Professor Faraday's statement of his opinion on the matter. "Though I
am not satisfied that the nervous fluid is only electricity, still I
think that the agent in the ner