ing which had already gained him such celebrity. The interpreter of mind took up his scalpel, and the learned men of the city sat around in silent expectation. In such a situation, there was one course which, it might be imagined, Dr Spurzheim would certainly have pursued. As the colleague of Dr Gall, he had been accused, in no very ambiguous terms, by the Edinburgh Review, of wilful misrepresentation, and of gross ignorance in a science which he pretended to have enriched by new discoveries. These accusations, being anonymous, he certainly was not bound to notice. Convinced, however, as he must have been, that such heavy charges against him were well known to his audience, he surely must have felt peculiarly anxious to do away any bad impression they might have made, by a minute and clear exposition of his leading doctrines, and a decisive demonstration of the correctness of his anatomical views. Strong in his own integrity, and in the soundness of his system, we can conceive him gladly preparing to confound his enemies, by appealing to the testimony of their own senses, and claiming, for an actual exhibition of new anatomical facts, a belief in the theories which he had deduced from their existence. How Dr Spurzheim availed himself of such an opportunity is well known to all who witnessed his dissection. Far from establishing his claims to pretended discoveries by actual demonstration, it appears that he involved himself and his system in further discredit, by his visible inability to display the new structure he had so confidently described. He left very little doubt, I believe, on the minds of his audience, as to the merits of craniology. In order, however, still further to obviate misrepresentation, and to place the claims of Gall and Spurzheim in a proper light, Dr Gordon drew up a treatise, entitled, "Observations on the Structure of the Brain, comprising an estimate of the claims of Drs Gall and Spurzheim to discovery in the anatomy of that organ." On the title-page of this treatise he placed his name. This, let it be observed, was no anonymous attack which an individual could pass over without notice. It is a treatise in which the author personally brings forward accusations most direct and pointed, and which, if well founded, go very far to affect the credit and character of Dr Spurzheim.
This gentleman and his colleague have asserted, that no anatomist before themselves believed that the brain was, throughout, of a fibrous structure. This, therefore, they claim as a discovery peculiarly their own, and considering it one of high importance, they style it, "La premiere et la plus importante des decouvertes, celle sans la quelle toutes les autres seroient imparfaites." Dr Gordon proves very satisfactorily, that from the time of Malpighi in 1664, downwards, such a fibrous structure was believed to exist every where throughout the cerebral mass. To such proofs Dr Spurzheim, in his pamphlet, returns no answer. This first and most important of their discoveries turns out, therefore, to be no discovery at all—and it will be seen that all the others are indeed "imparfaites."
Drs Gall and Spurzheim wished to appropriate to themselves the method of scraping the brain, as a mode of dissection peculiar to themselves, and best calculated to display its structure. Dr Gordon asserts, that this method was not invented by them. To this assertion Dr Spurzheim assents by his silence.
One of the most important points in his and Dr Gall's anatomical discoveries, concerns, as we are told by Dr Spurzheim, the two orders of fibres, viz. diverging, and converging or uniting. It is in fact upon the existence of these peculiarly arranged fibres, and upon the proof of a statement which has been positively advanced, that the brown matter secretes the white, that the whole system of Drs Gall and Spurzheim depends. I beg your readers particularly to notice, that it is upon the communication between the brown matter and the white medullary substance, to which it serves as a covering, that the doctrines of craniology depend for their chief support. Imagine no such communication to exist, and the brown capsule of the brain, and cerebellum, is nothing more than an unconnected covering to the white substance beneath. Now, in this case, if mind can be manifested by external signs on the head, these signs being caused by swellings, or a peculiar conformation of some substance within the cranium—that substance must,
