Author of "The Philosophy of Necessity," "Force and its Mental
Correlates," "The Education of the Feelings," &c.

"If these statements startle, it is because matter has been
defined and maligned by philosophers and theologians who were
equally unaware that it is, at bottom, essentially mystical and
transcendental."-TYNDALL.

"All our hopes now lie in a true understanding and philosophy
of man's nature."-H. G. ATKINSON, F.G.S.

LONDON:

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO

PREFACE.

"THE savant," Emerson says, "is often an amateur. His performance is a memoir to the Academy on fish-worms, tadpoles, or spiders' legs; he observes as other academicians observe; he is on stilts at a microscope, and-his memoir finished, and read, and printed-he retreats into his routinary existence, which is quite separate from his scientific."

Cuvier and St. Hilaire disputed over some two hundred pages upon the identity of organs: for instance, whether the forehoof of an ox is exactly the " same organ" with the wing of a bat.

Now we must not for a moment suppose that we have no interest in such memoirs to the Academy, or in such slight differences of opinion as appear to have existed between Cuvier and St. Hilaire; as, influenced no doubt by such considerations, M. Paul Bert, author of an Essay, "Sur la Vitalité propre des Tissus Animaux," has instituted a series of very ingenious experiments, without, however, as many will think, a sufficient fear of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals before his eyes: "" Insert," he says, "in the back of a rat the end of its own tail, having first pared it raw with a bistoury; it will heal and take root. As soon as the graft is complete, amputate the tail about one-third of an inch

from the old root. The rat's tail will henceforward grow the reverse way and out of the rat." And again he says:

"If you amputate the paw of a young rat, partially skin it, and introduce it through the skin of another rat's side, it will engraft, take nutriment, grow, and acquire all the ordinary parts of its structure, as if it had remained with its former proprietor." M. Taine, in his recent work, "De l'Intelligence," has endeavoured to apply these more curious than humane experiments to illustrate the relation between our physical and intellectual nature.

If the researches of the Germans have been less curious than the French, they have certainly been more important. It is now nearly a century since Dr. Francis Joseph Gall, a physician of Vienna, when a school-boy, accidentally made the discovery of a connection between certain definite parts of the brain and certain equally definite mental functions. He devoted his life to this study of Cerebral Physiology others have devoted their lives to the verification of his most important discoveries, so that the physiology of the brain-" the relation between our physical and moral natures"-is not untrodden and unknown ground. Our leading physiologists, however, appear to be still in the dark as to whether the part the brain has to play is that of a pot of pomatum-its function, according to the barber, being to "percolate through the skull and nourish the roots of the hair"- -or to perform the more noble function cf the organ of the mind. It is in the latter capacity we recognise it, in its plurality of organs, and we consider the study of the brain and nervous centres, as connected with thought and feeling, quite as important as M. Paul Bert's investigations into "Vitality'

-not that we wish to disparage his experiments. Professor Huxley has shown us even the commercial value of Redi's early researches into "spontaneous generation;" and no one, therefore, can say what may come out of M. Bert's transposition of rats' tails from the place where nature intended them, to the middle of the back. The science of the present day, however, would seem to be much more taken up with such speculations, and as to whether our forefathers were covered with hair, had pointed ears and a tail, or whether we began with civilisation or have ended with it, than with the discoveries of a man who is able to tell us what man is, not what he was countless ages ago. Gall has been forgotten, and the present generation is much less interested in the head than the tail; nevertheless I am bound to say, notwithstanding the scorn and contempt to which such an assertion will probably subject me, that forty-six years' close and continued observation has convinced me that the greater part of what has been laid down by Gall, Spurzheim, and Combe is true, and may be verified by any ordinarily well-qualified person who will follow their method of investigation. There may be a great deal more to know, and what we do know may be more perfectly known; but upon the facts already discovered has been based a Mental Science, more clear and practical than any with which the world has yet been acquainted, and which is admitted to be "the only psychological system that as yet counts any considerable number of adherents."

All our faculties both of mind and body have been first tried in the lower animals; they have been trans