Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 1.djvu/85

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mass, which act as truly in response to their time and object, as the compound forces which exhibit and preserve the harmonious movements of the heavenly bodies, and of the developments of which, in fine, the muscles are not the cause, but the humble though frequently the modifying instruments. For our present purpose, this relation of the two actions will appear at once, by comparing the origin of the small styloid muscles with that of the powerful temporal muscle; where it is seen at once that prominence of the origins is in more than an inverse proportion to the force of the respective muscles, and that both are large in comparison to the attachments of the great pectoral and latissimus dorsi. Still as all such processes are very small in infancy, and are found to bear a constant proportion to the vigour of action in their muscles, the modified effect of the latter becomes equally evident.

Such was the state of science with respect to this subject, when a new superstition made its appearance, not among the frivolous gay denizens of the south of Europe, but in the schools of the deep thinking philosophic Germans. It was essential to this new doctrine to suppose that every enlargement of the cranium from without, corresponds to, and is occasioned by, some equivalent augmentation of volume in the brain within, namely, in that point of it which corresponds to the region of the external augmentation. To establish this doctrine, this craniology or phrenology as it more lately has been called, one of two things is necessary. It was to be shewn, either that the surface of the brain corresponds entirely with the convex surface of the