Statistics of phrenology : being a sketch of the progress and present state of that science in the British Islands.

  • Watson, Hewett Cottrell, 1804-1881.
Date:
1836
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Statistics of phrenology : being a sketch of the progress and present state of that science in the British Islands. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    much ple<isure from its contents; and some of them have since become active phreiKilogists. The System is now reprinting for a fourth edition, and several editions of the Elements and the Outlines, by the same author, have been published. As 14.000 copies of Mr. Combe's Plirenolo- gical Works are now in circulation, if we allow five readers to each copy, this author has 70,000 readers ;—no small number where the subject is scientific, and opposed by many leaders in science. The Constitution of Man is omitted from this estimate, as not being exclusively a phre- nological work. Its circulation has exceeded 20,000. It seems, however, that some persons could read the Svstem with different ideas and feelings from those called forth in others ; its publication having induced a third attack on plirenology, in the Edinburgh Review, proceed- ing from the pen of its editor (at that time) Mr. Jeffrey, as public and uncontroverted report asserted. Thus the whole weight of this influential journal, of Mr. (now Lord Advocate) Jeffrey's name, and of Mr. Jeffrey's talents, was brought to bear against phrenology ; and this compound battering ram was moreover ballasted by a host of bor- rowed arguments, like so many taxes or tithes in kind, le\-ied on the pages of its predecessors. At all evpnts they are to be found there; and it speaks no little in favour of phrenolog)', that the ability and information of a Jeffrey could adduce against the science nothing in the shape of facts or argument more potent than those invented or used by the most puny antiphrenologists. It was not to be expected that an author so fully assured of the strength of his own position^ and so capable of maintaining it against aggression, should tamely suffer a mere name, however much celebrated, to prejudice the public against his works and science, in the absence of fact, in the absence of reason, and in the absence of originality in the arguments brought against it- Our Ju]>itcr tonans of phrenology, as he was not unaptly c ■^H?WWWirq