side?” ‘ Alas!” he replied, “ my poor brother has had his mouth on one side these forty years.”
Such cases will, in future, present no difficulty even to the beginner, and we recognise at once in Charles Bell the great characteristic of genius, that of giving the clearness of certainty to what before was either utterly unknown or but obscurely sus- pected.
Supposing, however, that this were the sole practical lesson as yet deduced from Sir Charles Bell’s discoveries, it would be unjust to measure their merit by this alone. Independently of the direct instruction to be derived from them, they have brought physiologists into the true path ; and should the thick veil which Nature has thrown over the operations of the nervous system be once drawn up, it will ever be remembered that Charles Bell first constructed the machinery for raising it.
It is instructive to remark and to remember that Sir Charles Bell did not make very numerous ex- periments on living animals ; but, guided by a careful study of the anatomy of the parts, and re- flecting on the spontaneous experiments, so to speak, furnished by disease, he was led to form views, which supported by a few well-planned experiments, discovered to him the truth, and enabled him to convert the guesses of former observers into indisput- able facts.
Had Sir Charles Bell not been a surgeon and a physiologist, he might have been an artist, so ad- mirable were his drawings, so exquisite his percep- tion of the beautiful. This talent was with him a
