propensities of youth, by withholding aliment from self-love, from obstinacy, from cruelty, and by cherishing benevolence, justice, piety; and correcting levity by gently stimulating the reflecting faculties. We can tell, too, why many a school-boy, who has carried away prizes and rewards, sinks into an ordinary adult; and why more than one dunce has burst out like a luminary in later years; for we can show the organs which make a brilliant infant and a dull man, and those which are of little use at Eton, but most essential to a statesman or a philosopher. Neither shall we allow ourselves to be imposed upon by any urchin’s cunning, or mistake ill will and idleness for inability. The marks by which we judge are registered by nature, indelible, immutable, and clear to every eye.

“But individual education is a very small portion of the good which we aspire to teach—(these people really are mad; their ambition is unbounded!). We will educate nations; and nothing can prevent us from fulfilling this mission, but the destruction of the human race. We will tell the men of every country their faults and their vices, their virtues and their talents, and hold them up as clearly as size and form can be held up, to the notice of mankind. None shall escape us. Already, not only Europeans,—English, French, Germans, Italians,—the most enlightened, the most refined of men, have we scrutinized, but Asiatics under every latitude, Africans thirsting on both sides of the Equator, Americans as wild as Africans, as civilized as Europeans. We have told truths to all, and pointed out the means of improvement. At this moment, indeed, they may not listen to us, but the day will come when they will advance but by us. To us is given to decide the great question of original national propensities, as of individual propensities, and to show how they may be expanded or repressed. We shall instruct rulers how to govern, and subjects how to submit, and strike the just balance—as various as the races and the regions of the earth—between the sovereign and the people; and the first time that we inspire oppressed reason to demand her rights, and to demand no more—that we teach men how much liberty they can bear, how much privation they must yet endure, we shall have our full reward.

“So much for the practical pretensions of our science. The reader must now hear our claims to speculative superiority. Dr. Spurzheim has said, and been most heartily abused for saying—and, if the science be false, most heartily deserves to be abused for saying,—that the whole philosophy of the mind must be entirely changed; that the study of man in this respect will become a new study, &c. In this dictum—most noble or most arrogant, according to events—we (phrenologists) concur, with the loudest cheers; and in this, do we say, lies the stupendous monument of our science. Since the earliest records of philosophy, sages have speculated on the heart, the mind, the passions, and the understanding. For more than three thousand years systems have flashed, and disappeared without leaving a trace. Some of these, indeed, were abundantly ingenious; but were defective in that which alone can make them lasting, truth. It would be curious to examine the hypotheses which have grown up, one after the other, in the fertile soil of fancy, Arabian, Chinese, Persian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and modern European, and to see how specious and how futile all have been. Not one of them was founded on any thing but conjecture; and, until Gall appeared, it was not supposed that mental philosophy, that psychology, ever could have any other basis. But Gall proceeded entirely upon fact; and those who accuse his system as imaginative, will probably call the ‘Faerie Queene’ an historical poem, and ‘Lear’ an algebraical tragedy. He stalked from brain to brain, from organ to organ, and trampled conjecture under foot. ‘The man of skulls’—aye, Mr. Edinburgh Reviewer, the boy of skulls—endowed in truth, with not less imagination than his predecessors, had yet more love of fact than they had; and this single faculty has placed him above them all. It is, indeed, most wonderous, that the catalogue of the innate faculties of man should have escaped the grey-haired philosophers of every age and climate, and that its first-fold should have been opened to a child of nine years old, who in maturity unrolled it all, except a leaf or two, which he left to his followers. Such a discovery, had it been made by a man after so long concealment, and so many attempts to accomplish it, would have been wonderful; but let it never be forgotten that it was the work, and not the accidental work, of an infant.”

ADVANTAGES AND OBJECTS OF

PHRENOLOGY.

“In proportion as any branch of study leads to important and useful results—in proportion as it tends to overthrow prevailing errors—in the same degree it may be expected to call forth angry declamation from those who are trying to despise what they will not learn, and wedded to prejudices which they cannot defend.”—Archbishop Whately.

Having pointed out in the introductory chapter the great end and aim of all learning—THE ADVANCEMENT OF MANKIND IN RELIGION, MORALITY, AND VIRTUE, we shall proceed to point out the advantages of Phrenology, in enabling man to become wiser, better, and happier. It will be universally conceded, that this life is a state of probation, that if we do well—that is, if we become God’s people, we shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but if we do evil, we shall have our portion in the lake which burneth with everlasting fire; for this reason St. Paul exhorts us to press forward to the prize of our high calling. “Let us go on unto perfection,” says he, and again, “let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us”—and in another place he tells us, that “it is appointed unto men once to die, and after that the judgment.”

Such then, being our situation, how imperative is the command to, “cease to do evil, and learn to do well.” We must first learn what is imperfect and then strive to improve,—we must look upon SELF IMPROVEMENT, as something possible, something allied to the better portion of human nature, something worthy of the noblest care and the mightiest efforts that human beings, aiming at perfection, can even hope to aspire to. We must recall the past, watch over the present, and strengthen ourselves against the future,—we must learn what we are and what we may be, for we have in ourselves the power of controlling as well as of watching our passions and our energies, and it is this prerogative that causes human responsibility. Phrenology teaches us that mental energy is invariably accompanied by an increase of the brain, in the portion which is acted on by that energy; if the intellect be expanded, the perceptive faculties in active operation, the nobler energies of charity and veneration employed for good, it is at once apparent; so too with the baser passions, the sensualist, the ignorant, and the depraved alike reveal by their organization the spirit that moves within them, and as we know by endless facts that the brain alters in proportion to the use or disuse of faculties, sentiments, or passions; so if we are right-minded we must infer that God created no such master-piece of unerring workmanship without designing it for our good; and if so, how culpable, how criminal must they be, who dare to doubt the hand of a nobler being in a design so beautiful,—how culpable must they be who neglect to use the