In the fourth book of "Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man," published by John Godfrey Herder, at Weimar, in 1784, I have found the following remarks, which certainly very curiously anticipate some recent speculations: "Even what may be termed a good or bad shape of the human head itself, appears determinable by this general and simple law of its adaptation to the erect posture. For as this shape of the head, this expansion of the brain into beautiful wide hemispheres, with its internal formation to rationality and freedom, were consistent only with the erect form ;-as the proportion and gravitation of the parts themselves, the degree of warmth they possess, and the manner in which the blood circulates through them, clearly show ;-no other than the superior human form could result from this internal proportion. Why does the crown of the Grecian head incline so pleasingly forward? Because it contains the amplest space for an unconfined brain, and indicates fine sound concavities in the frontal bone, so that it may be considered as the temple of clear and youthfully beautiful thought. The hind part, on the contrary, is small, that the animal cerebellum might not preponderate. I am persuaded that on the agreement of these parts will be erected a valuable science, to which physiognomy, proceeding on conjecture, would not easily attain. The grounds of the external form lie within; for every skull has been fashioned by the organic powers operating from within to without."

These speculations have never been altogether abandoned. The correspondents of Martinus Sriblerus, who met at the Grecian coffee-house, thus enunciate the result of their enquiries: "We proceed now to explain, by the structure of the brain, the several modes of thinking. It is well known to anatomists that the brain is a congeries of glands, that separate the finer parts of the blood, called animal spirits; that a gland is nothing but a canal of a great length, variously intorted and wound up together. From the arietation and motion of the spirits in those canals, proceed all the different sorts of thoughts. Simple ideas are produced by the motion of the spirits in one simple canal: when two of these canals disembogue themselves into one, they

make what we call a proposition: and when two of these propositional channels empty themselves into a third, they form a syllogism. Memory is performed in a distinct apartment of the brain. Some people think wrong and perversely, which proceeds from the bad configuration of those glands. Some are born without the propositional or syllogistical canals: in others that reason ill, they are of unequal capacities: in dull fellows, of too great a length, whereby the motion of the spirits is retarded,and so of the rest."

And Emanuel Swedenborg is another name which may be added to the proud catalogue of those who have ventured on these grave discussions. "There is in the brain an eminent sensorium, and in it are the inmost recesses, to which, and no further, the sensual rays of the body ascend: in those recesses the soul resides, ornamented with the most distinguished organical clothing, and in this abode, as it were, meets the ideas which emerge so far, and receives them as her guests."

A more modern work than any has lately appeared, entitled "Encephalogy, by Dr. Hirnschadel," though people say, illnaturedly, that it is a satire, and that this is merely a nom de guerre. Still the system is ingenious. The head is divided into sixty-eight organs or ratios. There is a complete division of labour. One even enables a man to die, called Expiratio. The inventor describes his travels; at length he arrives in Dublin. He is surprised to hear, in quite common conversation, of a new ratio, making a sixty-ninth, of which he had never before read nor heard. He immediately notes it down, and, as he wrote in Latin, he enters it by the denomination-" organum Botheratio, sive ambarum rationum mistura fortuita, effervescens, bullas gignens." But as this may not be a serious work, it would be inconsistent to introduce any more quotations from it in so serious a dissertation as these pages profess. Let us not, too, forget, among the abettors, a no mean authority, the ogre Caliban. He of all things dreads a conversion into the form of apes, "With foreheads villainous low."

Gall, a native of Swabia, and a student of Strasburg, has, within these few past years, claimed a monopoly of these dis

coveries. Like an Ovid Redivivus, he feels himself strongly impelled to sing not of bodies, but of minds, changed into new forms. He appears to be a man of inquisitive spirit, respectable education,-ingenious and candid,-patient and inoffensive ;-if prejudiced in favour of his system, only warped as every founder of a theory must be :-if ever out of temper, asking no other revenge upon his foes than that he may survive them, to flesh his knife with their brains, and fill his museum with their skulls. He established himself at Vienna,—and, having conceived his plan and rule when yet a school-boy, now had ample opportunity to apply it in the hospitals of that metropolis. But whether incautious or not, he gauged the crowns of subjects so well and so mercilessly, that another crown was considered in danger. The Capital was in little less alarm than when another Gaul thundered at its gate. Nor was the panic unreasonable. Since when that enlightened and paternal government interposed, it was only consistent with itself. For it claims the prerogative of making gentlemen, notaries, and poets: and has declared, by imperial edict, that it does not desire profound scholars but submissive subjects. Such a science might have elicited knowledge, fostered genius, excited emulation; and thus the jewel of the imperial prerogative might have been dimmed or shivered. But Magnates and Ecclesiastics were perfectly reconciled, by a royal assurance that the professor's hands and callipers should be restricted to the foreign heads which might bend themselves to his examinations. The issue might be expected; Austria was saved, and heads go on there as usual, alike unexamining and unexamined, unknowing and unknown. The "distracted globe” of thought and research soon becomes elliptical and misshaped : curves change into angles, and waving flexures into zigzag asperities. This innovation upon the standard-measure of the human skull has been prevented there; and in one happy country at least man raises a head, which can "perplex" no “monarchs with the fear of change." Such proportions banish political disquietude, all persons and all heads necessarily keeping in their sphere. Yet even ROUND-HEADS have proved troublesome, and made free with others beside their own. Whether CROPPIES

had worthy heads or not, they did not attempt to conceal them. -It was still only consistent in the boasted descendant of the Cæsars to seek to

"Have men about him, that are fat;

Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o'nights:

Not men who have a lean and hungry look;
They think too much: such men are dangerous."

Berlin and Dresden, however, welcomed our philosopher, the one with the favour of the court, the other with the enthusiasm of the people. About this time Spurzheim became a warm admirer of the theory, associated himself with the traveller, rose to be a sort of demonstrator to his lectures, and perhaps at the present time, and certainly in this country, more than shares his fame. The German illuminati took up the cause with singular ardour; though it was doubtlessly in Great Britain that some of its staunchest adherents were found. We are proverbially candid and credulous: and while the exotic philosophy buzzed in every converzationè, and adorned every boudoir, of fashionable life; while it acquired favour with the quidnunc and the bas-bleu; it ranked among its supporters some of the truly learned: and the very multitude (probably because the "many headed") paused ere they condemned. Scarcely have we a city, containing an university, or a town boasting a lunatic asylum, but it has added the beneficial institution of a Phrenological Society!

It may be proper to state the originality and amount of the discoveries assumed to be made by this Human Naturalist. I speak not of his physiognomy, for this is not justly a part of his system. Obscure authors, by the names of Theophrastus and Aristotle, thought of this before. It is unfairly mixed up with a system which is too well calculated to discredit and deform it. We are made to be affected with a fine head; the chisseled brow, the speaking eye! But who ever thought of cerebral convolution amidst this admiration? The love of proportion strikes us. The pride of our nature is stirred, when, notwithstanding frequent degeneracies of size and expression, the grandeur of the first model is renewed. An association of

intellect is felt. We yield to a spell of moral authority.— The "large and arched front sublime" is a very different spectacle when exhibited by a Lavater and by a Gall. In the one, what magnificent mood; in the other, what artificial detail! The one is a field left rich and luxuriant in its own growth; the other the same field staked into building lots. The one

is a noble palace; the other the same palace leased by sundry agents, and broken into divers offices. The claims of Craniology, be they true or false, must be viewed quite apart from Physiognomy: upon the latter, this system cannot, in legal phrase, found.—Nor will I now speak of those scientific deductions which it pretends to have infallibly established. I leave

to others whether the white or medullary matter be strictly and uniformly fibrous: whether it originate in the grey or cineritious matter as its matrix, and be supported by it as its pabulum: whether the first be nervous, and the latter a surrounding ganglion, which connects these fibrils: whether these filaments be all excurrent and diverging or recurrent and converging: whether the spinal marrow be their universal source or their termination: whether it can dignify the thinking faculties to unite them with that cord which is common to all vertebrated animals. I leave to others whether we should begin with the surface of the brain, or unwind it from what this system considers its origin; whether we ought to content ourselves with horizontal sections, as we slice a Dutch cheese; or commence with the root, as we eat our Celery with it.

Gall maintains that the substance we call brain is not, as some have thought, the one organ of thought, but a concatenation of organs: that these are the seats and mediums of all our faculties and affections: that their strength rests principally in their size, though partly in their activity, which again is determined by temperament: that the bony case or shell we call the head, has protuberances and depressions corresponding to the organs, whether fully or feebly developed, on the brain: and that these indications will readily confess themselves to the experienced eye and hand. Thus, like the skilful rhabdomantist, he has placed his divining rod on the surface of the skull; it has

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