veneration to have expanded brains as well as swelling ideas. "The head of CHRIST," says our physiologist, is always represented as very elevated."-Yet he was remarkable for meekness as well as piety. Spurzheim says of the organ of covetiveness, that "it gives a desire for all that pleases." Again, Dr. Gall observed, that " persons of a firm and constant character have the top of the brain much developed;" and this is called the organ of determinativeness. Now if so, are we to believe that the difference in resolute and irresolute persons is confined to this organ, and that the nerves, fibres, &c. of the rest of the brain are not lax or firm, in proportion as the person is of a generally weak or determined character? The whole question nearly turns upon this. Say that there is a particular prominence in this part, owing to a greater strength and size of the levers of the will at this place. This would prove nothing but the particular manifestation or development of a general power; just as the prominence of the muscles of the calf of the leg denotes general muscular strength. But the craniologist says that the strength of the whole body lies in the calf of the leg, and has its seat or organ there. Not so, in the name of common sense! When Dr. Spurzheim gets down to the visible region of the face, the eyes, forehead, &c. he makes sad work of it: an infinite number of distinctions are crowded one upon the back of the other, and to no purpose. Will any body believe that there are five or six different organs for the impressions of one sense (sight,) viz. colour, form, size, and so on? Do we see the form with one organ and the colour of the same object with another? There may be different organs to receive different material or concrete impressions, but surely only the mind can ab stract the different impressions of the same sense from each other. The organ of space appears to me to answer to the look of wild, staring curiosity. All that is not accounted for in this way, either from general conformation or from physiognomical expression, is a heap of crude, capricious, unauthenticated trash. I select one paragraph out of this puzzling chaos, as a sample of what the reader must expect from the whole. "What then is the special faculty of the organ of individuality and its sphere of activity? Persons endowed with this faculty in a high degree are attentive to all that happens around them; to every object, to every phenomenon, to every fact: hence also to motions. This faculty neither learns the qualities of objects, nor the details of facts: it knows only their existence. The qualities of the objects, and the particularities of the facts, are known by the assistance of other organs. Besides, this faculty has knowledge of all internal faculties, and acts upon them. It wishes to know all by experience; consequently it puts every organ into action: it wishes to hear, see, smell, taste, and touch; to know all arts and sciences; it is fond of instruction, collects facts, and leads to practical knowledge." Page 430. In the next page he affirms that "crystallography is the result of the organ of form," and that we do not get the ideas of roughness and smoothness from the touch.-But I will end here, and turn to the amusing account of Dousterswivel in the ANTIQUARY* ! *It appears, I understand, from an ingenious paper published by Dr. Combe of Edinburgh, that three heads have caused considerable uneasiness and consternation to a Society of Phrenologists in that city, viz. those of Sir Walter Scott, of the Duke of Wellington, and of Marshal Blucher. The first, contrary to the expectation of these learned persons, wants the organ of imagination; the second the organ of combination; and the last possesses the organ of fancy. This, I confess, as to the two first, appears to me a needless alarm. It would incline me (more than any thing I have yet heard) to an opinion that there is something like an art of divination in the science. I had long ago formed and been hardy enough to express a conviction that Sir Walter's forte is a sort of traditional literature (whatever he accumulates or scatters through his pages, he leaves as he finds it, with very few marks of the master-mind upon it)-and as to the second person mentioned, he has just those powers of combination which belong to a man who leads a bull-dog in a string, and lets the animal loose upon his prey at the proper moment. With regard to Prince Blucher, if he had not "funcy in himself, he was the cause of it in others," for he turned the heads of many people, who "fancied" his campaigns were the precursors of the Millennium. I have at different times seen these three puzzling heads, and I should say that the Poet looks like a gentleman-farmer, the Prince like a corporal on guard, or the lieutenant of a press-gang, the Duke like nothing or nobody. You look at the head of the first with admiration of its capacity and solid contents, at the last with wonder at what it can contain (any more than a drum-head), at the man of " fancy" or of " the fancy" with disgust at the grossness and brutality which he did not affect to conceal. These, however, are slight physiognomical observations taken at random: but I should be happy to have my " squandering glances" in any degree confirmed by the profounder science and more accurate investigations of northern genius! |