servative
mind; for the revolutionary science of the last forty years has been
concealed from the conservative majority, by its exclusion from the
press and from the college. But the "Journal of Man" has a still wider
field, a task in which it may well claim the co-operation of all truly
enlightened and philanthropic minds.

It was the singular good fortune of the editor, over forty-five years
ago, to crown his long investigations of the constitution of man by
the discovery and demonstration that all the powers of the soul were
exercised by the brain in a multiform subdivision of its structure,
every convolution and every group of fibres and cells having a
function appreciably distinct from the functions of all neighboring
parts, the vast multiformity and intricacy of its structure
corresponding to the vast multiformity and intricacy of our psychic
nature, which has never yet been thoroughly portrayed by either
philosopher or poet.

The functions thus discovered are at once both psychic and
physiological, for the brain is purely a psychic organ, when its
influence is not transmitted to the body; but becomes a physiological
organ, and in fact the controlling head and centre of physiological
action, when its influence is transmitted, not merely in voluntary
motion, but in the unconscious influence which sustains, modifies, or
depresses every vital process.

These discoveries were not _entirely_ new, for it was the
fundamental doctrine of Gall, the founder of the true cerebral
anatomy, that the brain consisted of different organs of psychic
functions; but in announcing the discovery (published from 1809 to
1819) of twenty-seven distinct organs, he fell far short of the
ultimate truth, as a necessary consequence of his imperfect and
difficult method of discovery by comparative development. The word
_phrenology_ has become so identified with his incomplete
discoveries, that it may be laid aside in the present stage of our
progress. There is no monotonous repetition of function in nervous
structures, and the possibility of subdivision of structure and
function is limited only by our own intellectual capacities.

Moreover, Dr. Gall did not ascertain the functions of the basilar and
internal regions of the brain, which were beyond the reach of his
methods, and entirely overlooked the fact that the brain is the
commanding centre of physiology, the seat of the external and internal
senses, and of organs that control the cir