The Standard of Wednesday has a long telegram from Berlin
reporting that Professor Flechsig, of Leipzig, and Rector of the University there, has, to his own satisfaction, localised in the brain the seat of the higher intellectual powers as distinguished from the individual senses of touch, sight, taste, hearing, die.; and has shown that these centres do not exist in the lower animals, nor even in new-horn children, but only begin to be developed after the third month. During the first three months, the nerves of the separate senses are developed, and after them comes the development of the innumerable nerve-fibres by which perceptions and sensations are transformed into thoughts, and made to asso- ciate together the thoughts which are most closely allied. That will be regarded by those who accept the discovery as a great triumph for the philosophy which deduces everything from sense and the association of ideas ; but all discoveries of this kind must be accepted with the utmost reserve as little beyond plausible conjecture. So far as they are founded in anatomy only, they can only depend on connecting post-mortem, traces of disease with the known mental deficiencies of those who died of such disease ; nor will this answer for infants, as it is impossible to say what is wanting in an infant of only
four or five months old. We suspect that Professor Fleclisig's conclusions are far in advance of the facts on which he professes to base them, unless indeed he has been allowed in Leipzig to experiment on living men, which is, we hope, highly improbable.
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