Education is making great progress in France. The number of colleges and the number of children at school are greatly increased. There are now five and a quarter millions attending primary schools. Politicians claim that whenever the people in a department are well educated they become republicans.
Genesis of the Brain
(Continued from [page 32].)
Is there anything miraculous or extravagant in believing that this invisible potentiality, which has such magical transforming and developing power, but which has never been known to arise from combinations of matter, has an origin which is, like itself, spiritual? For we can obtain matter from matter, and spirit from spirit, but never obtain spirit or life from dead matter.
The genesis of the human brain is therefore a microcosmic epitome of the macrocosmic evolution, controlled by the “over-soul”—the Divine power, of which we know so little.
To return to the embryo brain, which gives us visibly the epitome of the evolution of vertebrated animals,—why is it not also an epitome of the entire animal kingdom, from the radiata, articulata, and mollusca to the vertebrata, instead of representing the evolution of vertebrates alone? It may be so. It may be that man and other animals in germination pass through all stages, from the lowest to the highest; but the microscope cannot reveal the fact, for the jelly-like or fluid conditions of the nervous system during the first month after conception do not enable us to discover any organization or outline from which anything can be learned. And yet, from certain interesting experiments in sarcognomy which have never been performed except by myself or my pupils, I am disposed to believe that the germinal process of man goes beyond the beginning of the animal kingdom, and that he retains in his constitution spiritual elements which might not improperly be called, not a photograph, but a psychograph of the entire animal kingdom,—yea, of everything that lives, and even of the mineral elements that have no life.
These things are wonderful and grand indeed, but the self-sufficient powers that rule the world of human society have no desire to know them, and hence I have been content to enjoy them alone, or with a few enlightened friends.
It is in the second month of life in the womb that the fish form of brain is distinctly apparent, as shown by Tiedemann. The fish form is that in which we have only a rudiment of the cerebrum, which is so large in man. Behind the little cerebrum, which is smaller than the bulb of the olfactory nerve, we have the middle brain or optic lobes, which give origin to the optic nerves, and behind them the cerebellum.
Let it be understood that the cerebrum is the psychic brain, the cerebellum the physiological brain, and the optic lobes the intermediate or psycho-physiological brain, not sufficient to give the animal its character and propensities, but sufficient to guide it in swimming about.