Phrenology, and How to Use It. By Nicholas Morgan. (Longmans.)
—Mr. Morgan's is a very interesting book, one which doubtless makes a contribution of considerable value to the science of which it treats. For that there is such a science we are as firmly persuaded as we are that there is a science of astronomy. Still we cannot help thinking that Mr. Morgan has fallen into something of the error that has discredited phrenology. He feels himself, it would seem, in a position to localize between thirty and forty faculties, affections, Sm. Is not that going a great deal too far? Observers of the structure of the brain, in both the living and the dead subject, are, it is true, finding their way in this same process of localization, but they are finding it very slowly. The faculty of speech, for instance, has been localized (on questionable evidence however) lately, and that in a way which would upset the common theory, accepted in all phrenological systems, that the brain is double. Speech, we believe, has been lately asserted to dwell on the left side. But cautions inquirers still find themselves a long way off from the detailed mapping-out which the phrenological charts give us. One of the most interesting things in the volume is the account of a friend of Mr. Morgan's, who, through being in a peculiar physical condition, appears to feel the peculiar local action of the brain. The case may, we should think, be as valuable as was that of the man who, by the lucky accident that revealed without disturbing the action of the stomach, enabled the doctors to make such valuable observations in the region of digestion. We take this opportunity of recommending to our readers that they should leave their brains, when they have done with them, for purposes of scientific investigation. Anatomists complain that they get nothing but the brains of paupers, which are about as useless for their purpose of discovering the working of the intellect as would be the bodies of people who have been bedridden all their lives for the purpose of exhibiting the normal action of the muscles.
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