The evidence against the system of phrenology. Being the substance of a paper read at an extraordinary meeting of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh ... / [Thomas Stone].

  • Stone, Thomas.
Date:
1828
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The evidence against the system of phrenology. Being the substance of a paper read at an extraordinary meeting of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh ... / [Thomas Stone]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    from the teachers of this system being entitled to any praise for the originality of their views, they have only been re¬ viving and promulgating doctrines that were taught in the earlier ages, and which, having been rejected by the most enlightened of those times, fell into that oblivion, from whence, within the last thirty years, they have been res¬ cued, without the slightest reference or acknowledgment. Aristotle first assigned different operations of the mind to different parts of the brain.* * * § He also speaks of the fa¬ culties being indicated by certain forms and projections of the skull, which passage has been quoted with reprobation by Pliny,who seems to wonder why Trogus Pompeius, his predecessor, “ a most accurate writer,” should have co¬ pied from Aristotle such c< frivolous remarks.” The ob¬ jection of Pliny was that of a philosopher, and rested on their induction being founded on the observation of a single part, instead of the whole system.j He names the science “ Metoposcopy ;”§ and adds the curious fact of its having been applied, almost as we see it in modern times, to the portraits painted by Apelles. Suetonius, under the same appellation, mentions a report, that it had been applied to the heads of Britannicus and Titus Vespasian, when schoolfellows together in the palace of the Emperor Clau¬ dius. || It is, however, important to observe, that the ancients always considered Metoposcopy, or Phrenolo¬ gy, as it then existed, a vulgar superstition. The Cra- * De Anima. *j* Nat. Hist. lib. xi. cap. 52. J Nec universa haec (ut arbitror) sed singula observat, frivola, (ut reorj et vulgo tamen narrata.—Jbid. § Ibid. || Tit. ad init.