THE FOUNDER OF . FRANZ JOSEPH GALL, Phy.~ician ; UniTue Pioneer in the Terra Incognita o/the central Nervous S'qstem ; Discoverer of " Broc,~'s space ; " and (much misunderstoo~t and misrepresented) " Founder o] [the 'science" of] Phreno~o7y." By Jom~ K~oTx, M.~., M.D., Ch.B., and D.P.H. (Univ. Dub.) ; M.R.C.P.I. ; M.R.I.A. ; &c. TgERE are but few names, indeed, to be found among those which have obtained special notice in the history of science--true or false--the motives and achievements of whose bearers huve been so thoroughly misunderstood, or misrepresented, or both, as that of the " founder of phrenology." Hardly- even of Machiavelli can it be said with so much truthful fidelity, that " his works were misrepresented by the learned, misconstrued by the ignorant, censured bv the Church, abused with all the rancour of simu- lated [in his case, scientific] virtue ." Franz Joseph Gall was born at Tiefenbronn (border-line of Baden and Wiirtemburg), March 9, 1758, and died at Montrouge (near ), August 22, 1828. In the course of this scripturally-timed pilgrimage of three-score years and ten, sloth or lethargy, physical or mental, found no admission. He studied medicine at Strasburg and at , and in 1785 started on his medical career in the latter city. Eleven years later, he commenced to give special courses of lectures there on the structure and functions of the brain; the "localisation" of the latter having long been the subject of his most enthusiastic research and observatian. In the course of six years, the fame of his unprecedented views had attracted the attention of the Austrian Government ; the result of which was thathis public discourses on matters cerebral were prohibited, as being subversive of orthodox theologicM dogma. But the irrepressible lecturer would not be permanently silenced; and, accordingly, after another interval of three years (1805), he started on a wide European lecturing tour, which embraced (~-ermany, ltolland, Sweden, and ~witzerland. He was accom- panied--pretty necessarily--by an associate-assistant, Spurz- heim ; and at the end of a couple of years (1807), when his name and fame filled Europe, he serried in Paris to practise as a physi- cian, which he did with the most brilliant success. The memoir of the conjoint researches and discoveries of master and assistant, which was presented to the French Institute in the 378 Franz Joseph Gall, Physician. following year, elicited an unfavourable report from the leading scientific specialists of that accomplished and ezitical oligarchy, of whom Cuvier was one. The sentence was followed by the production of a series of works on the structure and functions of the brain and nervous system, which culminated in the colossal Anatomic et Physiotoqie d,t Syvt~ae NerJ;eu,. The accusations of materialism and ]atal,ism whic:h were diligentlv levelled against his system, called forth (1811) a volume entitled Des Disposi- tions lnnges de l'Ame et de l'h~,rit. In 1813 the hitherto sub- ordinate Spurzheim fel~ himself sufficiently accomplished--and, accordingly, independent--to take " Fre:lch leave " of his master, and left for England, the most. fructifying nursery of charlatans and cheats, with the well-founded hops of reaping' a harvest for himself by an unprincipled--but highly lucrative--misapplica- tion of his master's rese~rch3s and discoveries, and the fame thereto adherent. Gall vigorously protested against, and un- sparingly denounced, the pro:stare a vl ,nef,h.~:t~ of his quoadam associate ; to whom, and to the Caled)aian Combe, humanity is indebted for the shilling phrenological bust and the vagrant phrenological practitioner. The progressive devolutionary development which Gull's laboriously cultivated science of cerebral loealisation underwen~ at the hands of those worthies, and 6f those of the horde of blatant quacks and cheating charlatans who soon greedil7 adopted their methods--with re- vision of decorative illustrations and i nprovemellts--rapidly came to confer upon phreaologv an odorous reputation, which absolutely excluded the p~tronage, or even passing recognition, of all " scientists" who felt seriously anxious for the preserva- tion of the re~pecta')gity of their reputation. One of the pregnant sigls of the ti'nes, however, in this re- volutionary and democratic--if sometimes devolutionary and, perhaps, even retrograde--generation is the fact that it has liberally displayed instances of its scepticism of hearsay authority in matters of long-received opinions, and has pre- sented conspicuous activity in the whitewashing of dusky repu- tations. Machiavelli, Lucrezia Borgia, Mary Queen of Scots, Itenry VIII., Oliver Cromwell, Buonaparte, and various others have had many of the strongest items of incrimi- nating evidence advanced against them by contemporaries and immediate post'zrity, neutralised, or even completely re- versed, and, in every instance, modified more or less favourablv. And even the much-abused " founder of phrenology" and his Franz Joseph Gall, Physician. 379 despised science have of recent years been brought into the Court of Scientific Appeal by champions who have displayed their readiness and willingness to defend against all comers the validity of the scientific claims of the original cartologist of cranial topo- graphy and attempted localisation of cerebral function. Most of their arguments have, I believe, been advanced before-- some of them, perhaps, with a greater proportion of literary momentum, and eveu of scientific precision. These latter gifts tend, I fear, to become proportionally more rare among the ranks of the practitioners of the healing art as the broadcast diffusion of physical knowledge and mechauical methods renders the acquisition of a certain amount of so-called "practical" " science" so much more readily attainable by the proprietor of the average modicum of intellect. I would also indicate, in passing, another regrettable feature of the intellectual progress of the present generation: the unact:now[ed~ed neglect of the logical faculty and method in the scientific researches and discussions with which our eyes and ears are every day assailed. Some observant individual has remarked before now that logic is the one form of reasoning which men do not employ in every- day life. This statement is, I believe, uncontradictable. But if the syllogistic test had been periodically applied to the " scientific" methods, and " facts," and " proofs," which have continuously pervaded our mental atmosphere during the past half century, the world would surely have been saved from many considerable inundations of preposterous--and often mis- chievous-theories, whose practical applications have been so successfully floated on the intellectual (and thence on the mercantile) market. And earnest observers and thinkers would have escaped the depressing contemplation of the " scientific" bounce, and the Malvolio-nic self-appreciation, of so many con- temporaries who have managed to secure a reception within the inner circle of recognised teachers and representatives of materialistic knowledge, as well as of the more aggravating conceit of the extra-circumferential zone of aspiring candidates and hangers-on, which forms the chromosphere of the central illuminating mass of the chosen representatives of scientific revelation. A writer of the semi-inspired type has before now enunciated the concisely epigrammatic (as well as satisfactorily metrical) aphorism : "The proper ~tudy of mankind is man." 380 Franz Joseph Gall, Physician.

And, of all the departments of the tangled human economy, there is surely none which more worthily attracts man's concentrated scientific and philosophic attention than does the organ of mind and thought--of the powers and faculties which specially distinguish humanity from all other types of animated nature. The study of the brain is indeed a fascinating one; and in the present age, when every member o[ every civitised community is educated, and every educated person---male or female-- rejoices in the possession of a brain, and in the consciousness that the best furniture for its decoration and the most unlimited supply of nutrition suitable for the promotion of its ma.~imum growth and development lie within fairly easy reach, it may safely be affirmed of the total male population that every voter remains unsatisfied till he has furnished his own cerebral organ to his own special taste. And every woman, too--i~l every civilised state--glories in the conscious possession of a brain, and in the ability to display the powers and possibilities of its special function--the intellectual--especially if she happens to belong to the type known as " the New." Accordingly, it is a great--and a worthy--source of self-congratulation to the self- satisfied scientist of oar twentieth century to be able com- placently to feel that his knowledge of brain and mind has, by the researches of recent years, been brought to rest oa a reliably solid foundation of physical facts. The seat of the organ of thought, the ~rvx~ (soul, mind), the possession of which alone distinctively elevates man above the level of the rest of animated nature, has always--and very naturally--possessed a special interest for the philosopher and the scientist. The immortal, and presiding, unit of the triple soul of the " divine" old Greek was located by Plato in the brain. The association led him to make the cranial globe a microcosm, a quintessential " picture in little " of the entire spherical universe. And the enthusiastic modern Platonist, Dr. Henry More, the contemporary and--for a time at least-- devoted admirer of Descartes, enumerates no less than ten special localities (mostly, as might be anticipated, of the azyqos type of arrangement, in which various seekers after truth had indicated the seat of anchorage of the soul. Notwithstanding his own temporary admiration for the personality and philosophy of his great contemporary, More came, after careful examination, to reject with utter scorn Descartes's attempted localisation of the immortal part of man in the conarion. Franz Josel~h Gall, Physician. 381

Although it may prove true that, in the language of the gifted author of the Breitmann Ballads, the " mind is the result of food " in the last resort, there are, nevertheless, so many in- teresting and intricate items of physical fact involved in the count- less stages which have to be traversed, from the original sowing of the wheat and the impregnation of the bovine ovum to the assimilation of the bread and beef which are responsible for the genesis of the materials of a Hamlet or a Faust, or the scientific revelations of a Newton or a Pasteur, that the most self-appre- ciating democrat of the twentieth century can find as much to admire in the inner workings of the organ of human thought as ever did the most subtle Socratic dialectitian, the most versatile academic philosopher, the most logical peripatetic metaphysician, or the most dreamy medi~eva! mystic. And true it is that the first exposure of the solid bed-rock of physical science, on which our present knowledge and teaching regarding the brain and its functions now rest, and the deposition thereon of the earliest reliable contributions of anatomical and physiological facts which form the original foundation of the colossal superstructure of which medical science is now so justly proud, were the achieve- ments of the enthusiastic pioneer of cerebral localisation--Franz Joseph Gall. The observations of Gall, as originally made and noted down by himself, are of a quality and tone very different indeed from those of his m/s-representatives of succeeding generations. The enthusiastic devotion to the pursuit of localisation which, perhaps, sometimes led him to overstep the limits of cool scientific calculation, had the unquestionable effect of securing him the unwearying energy which is essential to the accumulation of an unprecedented wealth of original material. One of his relatively early localisations was that of Veneration, which presents a history somewhat more instructive than religiously edifying. For many years he went regularly to Church every Sunday, and occupied a seat in the front row of the gallery; not, however, so much to worship and to pray as to study the uncovered heads of those beneath. Prolonged experience demonstrated to his satisfaction that those worshippers who were most punctual, and most obviously ardent in their devotions, presented a decidedly pronounced elevation of the cranial vault in the bregmatic region. Hence Veneration. (To the superficial scoffer at Gall's system of localisation I would commend a passing inspection of the respective busts of Sir Walter Scott and Sir Thomas Watson, 382 Franz Joseph Gall, Physician. both of whom were, undeniably, men of exceptionally high ideals and aims.) The record of the fixation of Destructiveness would be more decidedly amusing had it been somewhat less gruesome. The principal items of a large series taken in evidence were three in number. This significant tripod included--(1) A young man who had already entered upon a promising career in business, but could obtain no mental rest till he became a butcher ; for the keenest enjoyment of his existence lay in the spilling of blood and the destruction of life ! (2) A metropolitan citizen of good posi- tion and prospects, who was possessed by so insatiable an appetite for infliction of pain and destruction of life that, when the post of public executioner became vacant he at once threw up all his other pursuits and became a candidate--the successful one, too ! (3) An ingenuous youth, whose career had been under observa- tion from childhood to adult life, had evermore ~njoyed a reputa- tion for cruelty of a type which was positively demoniacal. He always dismembered insects when the opportunity offered; maimed and tortured birds and quadrupeds, whenever and wherever it could be done with impunity; and never missed a chance of inflicting pain and physical injury on a schoolmate or a playfellow. When the time arrived for this hopeful youth to choose a career in life, nothing would satisfy him but to become a surgeon! All three enthusiasts in the pursuit of " Sch~den- freude "--the butcher, the hangman, and the surgeon--had been decorated by Nature's hand with cranial protuberances in the locality situated above and behind the external auditory meatus ; such facts led Gall to Ioealise the quality of Destructiveness in the corresponding region of the underlying brain. The bumps, of the surgeon are said to have been the most prominent of the series; the reader should, however, remember that he lived and practised in a pr~e-an~esthetic generation. The history of the foundation of so important a feature of human character upon such evidential data will doubtlessly titillate the organs of risibility of the ignorant and the sarcastic, and prejudice unfavourably their estimate of Gull's logic and mental physiology. But, before ventilating their opinions on a theme of dimensions so massive, they should take the trouble of ex- amining GulFs great work. I have not hitherto come to close quarters with anyone who has read his four folio volumes through and examined the atlas of beautiful illustrations. I have done so myself, and feel disposed to suspect that many of the original discoverers of matters cerebral will not feel specially grateful to Franz Joseph Gall, Physician. 383 the writers who have recently endeavoured to call attention to them in the duplex phases of praise and detraction. It may have the effect of sending the curious to examine for themselves. And I confidently promise them that when they do, they will find more startling--and immeasurably less equivocal--revelations regarding reality of authorship than any which have hitherto been brought to the surface in the course of the Bacon-Shake- speare controversy ! It is a peculiarly, singular, and, to the earnest seeker after truth and l

The devoted industry and energy of Franz Joseph"Gall'enabled him, a~ter calling in the aid of the collateral illumination deriv- able from his researches in comparative anatomy, to trace, with- out the help of the microscope, the roots of this, the most complex of all the structures of the human frame, to the lower part of the medulla oblongata--where the twentieth century anatomist, furnished with the most up-to-date staining re-agents and the most magnifying microscopes, is obliged to leave them still growing ! And, as a mere (uncontradictable) fact in the history of scientific progress, these two discoveries of Gall have formed the generating foci around which the entire expanding shell of our knowledge of the central nervous system--with its inevitable parasitic and saprophytic deposits, and excrescences of preten- tious nonsense and of shameless charlatanism--has since been developed. And these are but two specimens, even if the largest in size and importance, of the hundreds of discoveries made by Gall; which have, since the date of his published results, created the name and fame of so many original investigators in the domain of neurology! After all, as human nature still, unhappily, remains in an unregenerate state, there is not very much reason for surprise in the existence of the fact that the great pioneers of neural and mental science have united in a conspiracy of scornful silence, alternating with derisive detraction, regarding the merits of the work of Gall, the misunderstood "founder of phrenology." I trust that the claims of the value of his system of cerebral locali- sation may, in the near future, be re-examined with the added illumination of the more penetrating light and broader expanse of view now available, than either his successors and mis- representatives, or his plagiarists and detractors, have hitherto brought to bear upon its undeniably importanW-as well as in- tensely interesting--problems of cortical function. I, for one, implicitly believe that "these is something in " Gall's localisa- tion; as I believe that there is, and has been, in every body of doctrine which has at any period of history found wide-spread acceptance with humanity. I know no observant person whose opinion is not greatly influenced by "first impressions." And such impressions are but those made by the physiognomy of the individual subjected to inspection. Here I use the term physiognomy in its broadest sense ; which includes phrenology, as I conceive the latter. Not only do the cranial superficies, the various areas of the face, and its individual features--with their Fr Joseph Gall, Physician. 387 infinite variety of permutations and combinations displayed in the genesis and conveyance of " expression "--afford material to the observer for the formation of opinion regarding the men- tality and morality of the owner, but the outlines of every portion of the whole human body, with its attached limbs, even to the tips of the fingers and toes (inclusive of their ungual decorations), and-- by no means to be neglected--the individual complexion, w~th the appearance, character, and natural arrangement of the hirsute appendages. With the characteristics of form and feature I would include every type of movement which has not been modified or specialised by " education." The slouching gait of the incurable mischief-maker may safely be regarded as symptomatic ; so will I also guarantee to be the significance of the sandy scalp hairs~ brightening as they descend till they attain an approximately foxy tint in those of the beard--a form of decorative display which I beg to assure the reader will never be found to adorn the person of any specimen of homo sapiens who is not a natural Judas Iscariot. The " plastic" hand is a feature significant enough to influence the opinion of every rational observer--except perhaps the histologist or bacteriologist whose expanse of " scientific" vision is strictly limited by the margin of the field of his microscope. The inefficient grasp of the waxy, tapering fingers is fairly sure to prove to be mental as well as physical. And the ownership of demonstratively angular inter- pha.langeal articulations may pretty safely be regarded as indicative of correspondingly projecting features of the inner temperament---or temper. The beetling brow, the deep-set eye, the aquiline nose, the malar prominence, and the square chin, are features whose respective significance has been recog- nised for untold centuries; and will, I venture to opine, hardly ever become permanently discredited. It was not without some well-founded data that Giovanni Baptists Ports, more than three centuries ago, illustrated his famous folio, De Humana Physiognomia , with the animal faces (trunks and limbs) placed side by side with the human ones of which he regarded them as the " evolved" types. The reader there finds, in immediate juxtaposition, the busts of Socrates and of the stag (Cervus . ingeniosus inter anima~ia), in illustration of the significance of large eyes; and the finely-engraved title-page presents the significant facies of the fox, placed opposite the well-known features of Caesar Borgia. The long fore-arms which brought the hands (in the erect position of the body) down to the level 388 Franz Joseph Gall, Physician. of the knees, were regarded by Rhazes--the celebrated Arabian physician to whom the world is indebted for the original recogni- tion and published description of small-pox as a distinct disease-- as indicative of the/ortitudo et ]elicitas of the owner. They had been looked upon by Aristotle as connotative of audacia cure probitate, et larffitate. The flat sole, of which the entire surface touches the ground in walking, is illustrated in 1)orta's volume by that of the fox. Is this all nonsense ? It is pretty evident, anyway, that no such items will be pigeon-holed as " scientific " matter during the ]eadership of the scientists of the present day. Nevertheless, if "science " means knowledge, as some of us have been in the habit of believing, and if the proper study of mankind is man--which is the practical teaching of every-day existence, as well as the time-honoured preaching of the poet and the philosopher--I would commend to both the cock-sure scientist of the inner circle, and the intelligent denizen of our public thoroughfares, the consideration of the bearings of the aphorism of which the wisdom has never, I believe, been success- fully disputed: " Beware of the man whom dogs and children avoid." The fact that G~ll's boyish observation, that those of his school- fellows who were conspicuously best at their lessons had all of them large and prominent eyes, actually formed the starting- point, as it afterwards laid the foundation-stone, of his system of localisation of intellectual functions, has recently been noticed by an eminent critic in a tone of the loftiest conceivable contempt. When the school-boy became an anatomist he explained his former observations by the location of memory in the supra-orbital region of the cerebral cortex. " It is doubtful whether any young man ever made a worse start." So says his critic! And the latter, being an eminent surgeon, and (presumably) a skilled anatomist, proceeds to observe : " Regardless of all other possible causes, as the orbital fat, the size of the eyeballs, and the width of space between the eyelids, he persuaded himself that the pro- minence of the eyes was due to the quantity of brain above the orbits; and forthwith he assigned this region of the brain to memory for its kingdom." The perusal of such criticism has elicited some pained surprise; but I must, in the interest of justice and scientific truth, point out to my readers--while bearing in mind that the discussion involves healthy conditions only-- that the " amount of orbital fat" never induces increases pro- minence of the eyeballs, for conservative nature never permits Franz Jose~dr Gall, Physician. 389 an accumulation (where would be the eyeballs of our prosperous aldermen if she did ?) ; that the " size of the eyeballs " is one of the few approximations to mathematical consta~ncy in the macro- scopic anatomy of the human body, and never influences their prominence ; and that the " width of space between the eyelids" never modifies, even to the extent, of a hair's-breadth, the antero- posterior projection--that is to say, the prominence--of the eyeballs. This schoolboy observation of Gall appeals with peculiar force to the writer of this article ; from the fact that in the West of Ireland National School in which he received the rudiments of his own education, there was in his time one pupil who rapidly passed from class to class, and as rapidly rose from the foot to the head of the class to which he was in turn pro- rooted. He left all his competitors nowhere; while the more bilious of them vented their vindictive spleen by the applica- tion of the only opprobious epithets which directly suggested themselves--" bullet-eyes " and " saucer-eyes." Since that (now, unhappily, remote) date I have noted this feature in students--inclusive of medical, of whom I have had opportunities of studying very many, indeed--and, at the present moment, my experience is wholly corroborative of the boyish observation of Gall. And I would suggest to the future detractors of the Founder of 1)hrenology that, before ventilating their private opinions on the value of his views in this connection, they should obtain those of all available schoohnasters of large experience. I have already alluded to his localisation of veneration and of destructiveness, and have mentioned in association with the former two of the most brilliant contributors to the literature of romance and of medicine, respectively. I wilt now add--as a suggestion for the future criticism of intelligent observers that I believe that the owner of a well-arched bregmatic elevation will be more than likely to be found to be an aspirant to high ideals and an eager pursuer of the same--so far as the unspiritual Diety, Circumstance, will permit him to be. On the other hand, I will unhesitatingly risk the opinion that the owner of a cranium nearly as wide behind the ears as long from before backwards, and closed above by an approximately flat roof, will be found on testing to be a born scoundrel of the worst--the coolly calcu- lating-type; the human specimen who, in Oriental life, would make a successful Thug (devoted to his calling) ; and, in the com- munities of Western Civilisation, develops by "natural selection" into an eminently respectable metropolitan attorney. 390 Franz Joseph Gall, Physician.

If my readers have had their interest arrested during the perusal of the preceding paragraphs of this communication, they will now be less startled by a statement of fact which appears to be anything rather than familiar to a very large pro- portion of the members of our profession; that the researches and discoveries of Franz Joseph Gall meant as much for our knowledge of the central nervous system as did those of Isaac Newton for our knowledge of the solar system--and even a great deal more. All the most important fundamental facts connected with the heavenly bodies had been thoroughly well known to the votaries of astronomy before Newton succeeded in reducing them to an apparently satisfactory system by his application of the theory of gravitation--a theory which, as the initiated well know, may some day be shown to be as purely hypothetical as Gall's system of cerebral localisation--or even far more so. To the present writer, the fate of Franz Joseph Gall in his scientific pilgrimage has long seemed peculiarly reminiscent of that of Lemuel Gulliver in his Lilliputian sojourn. And the articles of scientific impeachment, in the case of the former, do bear such a distressful family likeness of feature and outline to the political ones drawn up by the courtiers and lawyers of the mighty Island Empire for the purpose of securing the destruction of the latter! And the key which will unlock the mystery of each is, I venture to affirm, to be found in the bitterly cynical aphorism--too obviously inspired by his own personal ex- perience-of the author of the imnmrtal Travels: " Whenever a true genius appears in the world you may always know him by this sign, that all the dunces are arrayed in eonftderacy against him." Let the self-satisfied--and sometimes feather-headed scientist of the twentieth century soothe his moments of leisure by an occasional glance through the wrong end of his telescope at the record of the life-work of the "Founder of Phrenology." But, in the name of truth and justice, let the consciousness of his assured pride of place not prevent him from giving due credit to Franz Joesph Gall; who laid the foundations of our present knowledge of the nervous system, with immeasurably less pro- portional assistance from the works of his predecessors than did Newton in the case of astronomy, or Lavoisier in that of chemistry, or Faraday in that of electricity--or, indeed, any other discoverer or inventor known to the annals of the manifold departments of natural and physical science.