as
fallen through the exposition of peripatetic charlatans should not
make us forget that Dr. Gall himself was apparently a highly educated
physician, a careful student of the brain and mind according to the best
light of his time, and, withal, an earnest and honest believer in the
validity of the system he had originated. The system itself, taken as a
whole, was hopelessly faulty, yet it was not without its latent germ
of truth, as later studies were to show. How firmly its author himself
believed in it is evidenced by the paper which he contributed to the
French Academy of Sciences in 1808. The paper itself was referred to a
committee of which Pinel and Cuvier were members. The verdict of this
committee was adverse, and justly so; yet the system condemned had at
least one merit which its detractors failed to realize. It popularized
the conception that the brain is the organ of mind. Moreover, by its
insistence it rallied about it a band of scientific supporters, chief of
whom was Dr. Kaspar Spurzlieim, a man of no mean abilities, who became
the propagandist of phrenology in England and in America. Of course such
advocacy and popularity stimulated opposition as well, and out of the
disputations thus arising there grew presently a general interest in the
brain as the organ of mind, quite aside from any preconceptions whatever
as to the doctrines of Gall and Spurzheim.

Prominent among the unprejudiced class of workers who now appeared was
the brilliant young Frenchman Louis Antoine Desmoulins, who studied
first under the tutorage of the famous Magendie, and published jointly
with him a classical work on the nervous system of vertebrates in
1825. Desmoulins made at least one discovery of epochal importance. He
observed that the brains of persons dying in old age were lighter than
the average and gave visible evidence of atrophy, and he reasoned that
such decay is a normal accompaniment of senility. No one nowadays would
question the accuracy of this observation, but the scientific world
was not quite ready for it in 1825; for when Desmoulins announced his
discovery to the French Academy, that august and somewhat patriarchal
body was moved to quite unscientific wrath, and forbade the young
iconoclast the privilege of further hearings. From which it is evident
that the partially liberated spirit of the new psychology had by no
means freed itself altogether, at the close of the first quarter of
the nineteenth century, from