Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 / Volume 1, Number 1

by Unknown

Thus it is evident that he recognized the structure behind the external angle of the eye as an important part of the organ of language.

The interior portion of the convolution is the more intellectual portion of the organ, while the exterior portion is that which holds the closest relation to the fibres of the corpora striata in the middle lobe, and may therefore most properly be called the organ of language or of speech, the impairment of which produces aphasia, or loss of speech. This is the form which has chiefly attracted the attention of the medical profession, as it very often accompanies paralytic affections from disease of the corpora striata.

Evidently Gall arrived at the correct location, and he illustrates the discovery by referring to a great number of authors and scientists whose development he observed. His most decisive fact is the case of a patient who lost the memory of names entirely, but not the power of speech, by a thrust from a foil, which penetrated through the face, the posterior inner part of the front lobe, at its junction with the middle lobe, thus wounding the internal part of the organ of language, but not reaching the outer posterior part, at the island of Reil, to which pathologists have given their chief attention.

Evidently Gall had the correct idea, and should have been duly credited by the pathologists who have verified his discovery.

In verifying this discovery by excitement of the organs, I find the centre of language behind the external angle of the eye, on each side of which, toward the nose and toward the temples, are analogous functions which might, if we did not analyze closely, be included with it, as portions of the organ of language.

The discoveries of Gall, though no longer sustained by colleges or phrenological societies, have never lost their hold upon the students who follow his teachings and study nature. A few phrenological writers and lecturers maintain the interest among those they reach, but our standard literature generally ignores the doctrines, and forgets the name of Gall. Yet the eclipse is not total. It will pass away as this century ends, and the fame of the great pioneer in science will be immortal, for it rests not on any wave of eighteenth century opinion, but is based on that which is “immutable and eternal.”

Yet so thoroughly has the present generation of physicians been misled by the colleges into ignorance of the labors of Gall, that although they know the location of the faculty of language is now beyond doubt, they do not think of the discoverer or understand his discoveries, but vaguely suppose that Ferrier, Jackson, Fritsch, Hitzig, and others have entirely superseded Gall by their inferences from experiments on the brains of animals. In this how greatly are they deceived! All that modern vivisectors have done has utterly failed to disturb the cerebral science derived from cranial observation by Gall and myself, and from direct experiment by myself. On the contrary, the immense labor of their researches serves only to add new illustrations and facts corroborating and co-operating with what was previously ascertained, as will be fully shown when “Cerebral Psychology” shall be published.

It was once supposed that the intellectual functions of the front lobe were entirely refuted by discoveries which proved the front lobe the source of muscular impulses. More thorough experimenting dissipated this illusion. Ferrier reported that after a partial ablation of the front lobes in intelligent monkeys, “instead of, as before, being actively interested in their surroundings and curiously prying into all that came within the field of their observation, they remained apathetic or dull, or dozed off to sleep, responding only to the sensations or impressions of the moment, or varying their listlessness with restless and purposeless wanderings to and fro. They had lost to all appearance the faculty of attentive and intelligent observation.” This is precisely what the true cerebral psychology indicates. The imaginary muscular powers were not at all detected, for the section of the front lobe had no influence on the muscular system.

The science of Gall was a science of facts relevant to great principles. The science of his opponents was a science of irrelevant facts, revealing no philosophy. Students of nature adhered to Gall; students of books and adherents of authority neglected him. Of this there is no better illustration than the great collection of De Ville in London, of which the following account is given in the admirable treatise on phrenology (of 637 pages) by Dr. James P. Browne of Edinburgh.

“How wide and various are the channels through which the phrenologist derives his facts. In society, whichever way he turns, they are constantly being presented for his contemplation. Besides there is not a city or town of any note that does not contain a collection of authentic casts of well-known persons; and up to the year 1853, the gallery of Mr. De Ville, in London, contained the largest and most valuable phrenological collection in the world of casts and skulls of men and women remarkable for the greatness of their talents, or the peculiarities of their dispositions; including above three hundred busts, both antique and modern, of the most renowned men the world has ever seen. The whole number amounted at least to three thousand. About two thousand skulls of animals of every denomination were also to be found there. There could be seen the form of head which accompanied the poetical instincts and high moral aspirations of the poor peasant boy, John Clare; and how strikingly dissimilar it was in its most marked characteristics to the head of George Stevenson, one of the most original of mechanical geniuses. Both were self-taught, but one was intensely active, the other cogitative. The mind of Clare was constantly engaged in poetical musings upon the moral affections, their pains and their pleasures; that of Stevenson was drawn by an inherent impulse to physical objects, and perseveringly devoted to the discovery of such mechanical combinations of them as might be of lasting benefit to society. There might be pointed out the cause of the difference of style which characterized the oratory of Mansfield and Erskine, of Canning and of Brougham: and that which constituted the elements of mind and their combinations, which raised Edmund Burke, as a prescient statesman, to a height such as neither Pitt, nor Fox, nor even Chatham was capable of reaching. There might be seen in Banks’s fine bust of him, the cause why Warren Hastings, though he was endowed with many good qualities which endeared him to his friends, was, nevertheless, covetous, self-willed, domineering, unjust, and, in some instances, pitiless, as Governor-General of India. What a contrast to this did the bust of the Marquis of Wellesley, by Nollekens, present. Not only did it indicate that the disposition of that distinguished statesman was unimbued with the slightest tincture of hypocrisy, avarice, or the love of self-willed domination, but, on the contrary, it was phrenologically symbolic of an instinctive carelessness in regard to his own pecuniary interests, a disposition which in his case, perhaps, amounted to a fault, and which his intellect, capacious of great things, and comparatively heedless of whatever is little, was ill-calculated to redress. There might be seen in Behnes Burlowe’s bust of Macintosh indications of the vastness of his intellect, and the unobtrusive gentleness of his disposition; whilst Chantrey’s exquisite bust of Lord Castlereagh afforded marked indications of his having been endowed with courage the most heroic, unalloyed by the slightest tinge of complexional fear, and with an intellect well balanced, devising, and industrious, but certainly narrow in its range as compared with that of Sir. J. Macintosh. There, too, might be seen the true physical indications of the imperturbable coolness of Castlereagh, and of the sensitiveness and warm susceptibility of Canning.