it or Mirthfulness, Eventuality,
Individuality, Perceptive Organs, Time, Comparative Sagacity,
Causality, Tune, Constructiveness, Language--Comments on the
Organology of Gall.

The first question that occurs to the enlightened enquirer, when he
learns that the functions of the brain have been positively determined
by experiment, is whether the cranioscopy of Gall and Spurzheim was
successful in locating the cerebral functions, and how nearly their
inferences from development correspond with the revelations of
experiment.

It is with great pleasure that I am able to say that the system of
Gall and Spurzheim was a wonderful approximation to the truth. Dr.
Gall was pre-eminently the scientific pioneer of the nineteenth
century. No single individual ever did so much to enlarge the sphere
of human knowledge, and to establish the permanent foundations of
philosophy. Up to his time, the brain of man was at once the greatest
mystery of anatomy and the repository of a greater amount of wisdom
and truth than all other realms of science which had previously been
explored. But so limited was the knowledge, and so narrow the
understanding of the learned, that the grandeur of cerebral science
was not even suspected, and, even at the present time, it is so remote
from the speculations of the learned that, like a distant star, it has
few practical relations to their life; nor will its magnitude be
realized until an ample literature shall have made its scientific
record.

Into this field of mystery, Dr. Gall advanced with a courage unknown
to his predecessors, and his success was equal to his courage. The
entire plan and constitution of the brain were revealed by his
anatomical genius, and his successors have but carried further and
perfected his anatomical system. His anatomical exposition of the
brain, addressed to the French Institute in 1808, is one of the great
landmarks of the progress of science--the commencement of a new era;
and his exposition of its functions was the solution of a problem
which had defied the genius and learning of all his predecessors. His
discoveries in anatomy were so great that Reil (himself a brain
anatomist of the highest rank, whose name is permanently associated
with anatomy by the name "Island of Reil," which belongs to the
location in which Gall made his first discovery of the faculty and
organ of language), Reil, I say, declared that Dr. Gall had shown him
more in his dissections