COMBACONUM, or Kumbakonam, a city of British India, in the Tanjore district of Madras, in the delta of the Cauvery, on the South Indian railway, 194 m. from Madras. Pop. (1901) 59,623, showing an increase of 10% in the decade. It is a large town with wide and airy streets, and is adorned with pagodas, gateways and other buildings of considerable pretension. The great gopuram, or gate-pyramid, is one of the most imposing buildings of the kind, rising in twelve stories to a height of upwards of 100 ft., and ornamented with a profusion of figures of men and animals formed in stucco. One of the water-tanks in the town is popularly reputed to be filled with water admitted from the Ganges every twelve years by a subterranean passage 1200 m. long; and it consequently forms a centre of attraction for large numbers of devotees. The city is historically interesting as the capital of the Chola race, one of the oldest Hindu dynasties of which any traces remain, and from which the whole coast of Coromandel, or more properly Cholamandal, derives its name. It contains a government college. Brass and other metal wares, silk and cotton cloth and sugar are among the manufactures.
COMBE, ANDREW (1797-1847), Scottish physiologist, was born in Edinburgh on the 27th of October 1797, and was a younger brother of George Combe. He served an apprenticeship in a surgery, and in 1817 passed at Surgeons’ Hall. He proceeded to Paris to complete his medical studies, and whilst there he investigated phrenology on anatomical principles. He became convinced of the truth of the new science, and, as he acquired much skill in the dissection of the brain, he subsequently gave additional interest to the lectures of his brother George, by his practical demonstrations of the convolutions. He returned to Edinburgh in 1819 with the intention of beginning practice; but being attacked by the first symptoms of pulmonary disease, he was obliged to seek health in the south of France and in Italy during the two following winters. He began to practise in 1823, and by careful adherence to the laws of health he was enabled to fulfil the duties of his profession for nine years. During that period he assisted in editing the Phrenological Journal and contributed a number of articles to it, defended phrenology before the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh, published his Observations on Mental Derangement (1831), and prepared the greater portion of his Principles of Physiology Applied to Health and Education, which was issued in 1834, and immediately obtained extensive public favour. In 1836 he was appointed physician to Leopold I., king of the Belgians, and removed to Brussels, but he speedily found the climate unsuitable and returned to Edinburgh, where he resumed his practice. In 1836 he published his Physiology of Digestion, and in 1838 he was appointed one of the physicians extraordinary to the queen in Scotland. Two years later he completed his Physiological and Moral Management of Infancy, which he believed to be his best work and it was his last. His latter years were mostly occupied in seeking at various health resorts some alleviation of his disease; he spent two winters in Madeira, and tried a voyage to the United States, but was compelled to return within a few weeks of the date of his landing at New York. He died at Gorgie, near Edinburgh, on the 9th of August 1847.
His biography, written by George Combe, was published in 1850.
COMBE, GEORGE (1788-1858), Scottish phrenologist, elder brother of the above, was born in Edinburgh on the 21st of October 1788. After attending Edinburgh high school and university he entered a lawyer’s office in 1804, and in 1812 began to practise on his own account. In 1815 the Edinburgh Review contained an article on the system of “craniology” of F. J. Gall and K. Spurzheim, which was denounced as “a piece of thorough quackery from beginning to end.” Combe laughed like others at the absurdities of this so-called new theory of the brain, and thought that it must be finally exploded after such an exposure; and when Spurzheim delivered lectures in Edinburgh, in refutation of the statements of his critic, Combe considered the subject unworthy of serious attention. He was, however, invited to a friend’s house where he saw Spurzheim dissect the brain, and he was so far impressed by the demonstration that he attended the second course of lectures. Investigating the subject for himself, he became satisfied that the fundamental principles of phrenology were true—namely “that the brain is the organ of mind; that the brain is an aggregate of several parts, each subserving a distinct mental faculty; and that the size of the cerebral organ is, caeteris paribus, an index of power or energy of function.” In 1817 his first essay on phrenology was published in the Scots Magazine; and a series of papers on the same subject appeared soon afterwards in the Literary and Statistical Magazine; these were collected and published in 1819 in book form as Essays on Phrenology, which in later editions became A System of Phrenology. In 1820 he helped to found the Phrenological Society, which in 1823 began to publish a Phrenological Journal. By his lectures and writings he attracted public attention to the subject on the continent of Europe and in America, as well as at home; and a long discussion with Sir William Hamilton in 1827-1828 excited general interest.
His most popular work, The Constitution of Man, was published in 1828, and in some quarters brought upon him denunciations as a materialist and atheist. From that time he saw everything by the light of phrenology. He gave time, labour and money to help forward the education of the poorer classes; he established the first infant school in Edinburgh; and he originated a series of evening lectures on chemistry, physiology, history and moral philosophy. He studied the criminal classes, and tried to solve the problem how to reform as well as to punish them; and he strove to introduce into lunatic asylums a humane system of treatment. In 1836 he offered himself as a candidate for the chair of logic at Edinburgh, but was rejected in favour of Sir William Hamilton. In 1838 he visited America and spent about two years lecturing on phrenology, education and the treatment of the criminal classes. On his return in 1840 he published his Moral Philosophy, and in the following year his Notes on the United States of North America. In 1842 he delivered, in German, a course of twenty-two lectures on phrenology in the university of Heidelberg, and he travelled much in Europe, inquiring into the management of schools, prisons and asylums. The commercial crisis of 1855 elicited his remarkable pamphlet on The Currency Question (1858). The culmination of the religious thought and experience of his life is contained in his work On the Relation between Science and Religion, first publicly issued in 1857. He was engaged in revising the ninth edition of the Constitution of Man when he died at Moor Park, Farnham, on the 14th of August 1858. He married in 1833 Cecilia Siddons, a daughter of the great actress.
COMBE, WILLIAM (1741-1823), English writer, the creator of “Dr Syntax,” was born at Bristol in 1741. The circumstances of his birth and parentage are somewhat doubtful, and it is questioned whether his father was a rich Bristol merchant, or a certain William Alexander, a London alderman, who died in 1762. He was educated at Eton, where he was contemporary with Charles James Fox, the 2nd Baron Lyttelton and William Beckford. Alexander bequeathed him some £2000—a little fortune that soon disappeared in a course of splendid extravagance, which gained him the nickname of Count Combe; and after a chequered career as private soldier, cook and waiter, he finally settled in London (about 1771), as a law student and bookseller’s hack. In 1776 he made his first success in London with The Diaboliad, a satire full of bitter personalities. Four years afterwards (1780) his debts brought him into the King’s Bench; and much of his subsequent life was spent in prison. His spurious Letters of the Late Lord Lyttelton[1] (1780) imposed on many of his contemporaries, and a writer in the Quarterly Review, so late as 1851, regarded these letters as authentic, basing upon them a claim that Lyttelton was “Junius.” An early acquaintance with Lawrence Sterne resulted in his Letters supposed to have been written by Yorick and Eliza (1779). Periodical literature of all sorts—pamphlets, satires, burlesques, “two thousand columns for the papers,” “two hundred biographies”—filled up the next years, and about 1789 Combe was receiving £200 yearly from Pitt, as a pamphleteer. Six volumes of a Devil on Two Sticks in England won for him the title of “the English le Sage”; in 1794-1796 he wrote the text for Boydell’s History of the River Thames; in 1803 he began to write for The Times. In 1809-1811 he wrote for Ackermann’s Political Magazine the famous Tour of Dr Syntax in search of the Picturesque (descriptive and moralizing verse of a somewhat doggerel type), which, owing greatly to Thomas Rowlandson’s designs, had an immense success. It was published separately in 1812 and was followed by two similar Tours, “in search of Consolation,” and “in search of a Wife,” the first Mrs Syntax having died at the end of the first Tour. Then came Six Poems in illustration of drawings by Princess Elizabeth (1813), The English Dance of Death (1815-1816), The Dance of Life (1816-1817), The Adventures of Johnny Quae Genus (1822)—all written for Rowlandson’s caricatures; together with Histories of Oxford and Cambridge, and of Westminster Abbey for Ackermann; Picturesque Tours along the Rhine and other rivers, Histories of Madeira, Antiquities of York, texts for Turner’s Southern Coast Views, and contributions innumerable to the Literary Repository. In his later years, notwithstanding a by no means unsullied character, Combe was courted for the sake of his charming conversation and inexhaustible stock of anecdote. He died in London on the 19th of June 1823.