his discoveries of
mental organs in the brain has been so fluctuating? Why have the
discoveries that came forward with so imposing a prestige at the
beginning of this century so entirely lost that prestige in the
colleges in sixty years, that the writings of Gall and his disciples
are generally neglected? Vague, unscientific speculations have taken
their place; the colleges and literati are groping in darkness, and,
like plants in a cellar which reach out to the dim windows, they look
anxiously for the information that may come from laboratories and
anatomical halls, where animals by thousands are tortured to find the
sources of _physical_ functions, forgetful of the fact that the human
brain is a _psychic_ organ, and that _a whole century of such
investigations_ would leave the grand problems of _conscious_ life and
character in primeval darkness!

Have they no respect for the labors and honorable observations of
clear-headed scientists fifty to eighty years ago? Were the anatomists
Reil and Loder deceived when they testified to Gall's wonderful
discoveries in anatomy? Were Andral, Broussais, Corvsart, and others,
who stood at the head of the medical profession in France, deceived
when they were followers of Gall? Was Dr. Vimont deceived when the
study of the animal kingdom converted him from an opponent to a
supporter of Gall? Were Elliotson and Solly of London, the Combes of
Scotland, Macartney of Ireland, and a full score of others in the
highest ranks of medical science deceived in giving their testimony
that the anatomy of the brain, its development in the healthy, its
amply recorded pathology, revealed in hospitals, and its phenomena in
the insane asylums and prisons, supported the doctrines of Gall?

They were not deceived, and they were not blind. _They were
observers._ Their successors, sinking into the agnosticism of
pseudoscience, have thus sunk because they have abandoned the methods
of science to adopt the methods of ignorant partisanship. They have
not studied the comparative development of the brain in connection
with character, and therefore they know little or nothing of it. They
are not competent as observers of development, because they have never
attempted to become acquainted with it. Even so eminent a writer as
the late Prof. W. B. Carpenter shows by his writings, which are a
monument of laborious erudition, that he did not understand so simple
a matter as the external form of the cranium belon