Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887: Volume 1, Number 3
Religion
Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887: Volume 1, Number 3
Medicine -- Periodicals; Phrenology -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
I have not found in our anatomical works what I consider a
satisfactory exposition of this subject. Beginning as a student with
Spurzheim's anatomy of the brain, which ought to have been the
clearest and most complete of all, I found it so obscure and
unsatisfactory that until I had made many dissections I had no very
clear understanding. I have never found any pleasure in the writings
of Spurzheim. In more recent authors the anatomical details are very
abundant indeed, and sufficient to tax the _memory_ heavily, but
without that system and philosophy which appeal to the understanding
and make our conceptions satisfactory, as I hope to make them to my
readers, who must have very incorrect conceptions of the plan of the
brain, if they have relied upon the writings of Mr. Combe and his
successors of the phrenological school, none of whom, so far as I am
aware, have really understood cerebral anatomy.
Let us approach the subject by taking an exterior and general view,
then by tracing the embryonic growth of the brain, and the interior
connections of its fibres, until we are fully prepared to judge of its
development as it lies in the skull, and to understand the relation of
each organ to all other portions. Then we can study its functions with
a clear understanding of the relations of the organs to each other,
which is the material basis of psychic science, and with full
confidence in our ability to judge and compare living heads and skulls
of man and animals.
[Illustration]
Let us take an exterior view by removing one half of the skull from
the right side of the head. This enables us to see that the front
portion of the brain rests above the sockets of the eyes, coming down
in the centre as low as the root of the nose, but a little higher
exteriorly. When we touch the forehead just over the root of the nose,
our finger touches the lowest level of the front lobe, the seat of the
intellect; but when we touch the external angle of the brow on the
same level, we touch a process of bone, and our finger is fully half
an inch below the level of the brain.
In the posterior view we see that below the great mass of brain which
is called the cerebrum there lies a smaller body, shaped much like a
small turnip, called the cerebellum or little brain, separated from
the cerebrum by a firm, horizontal membrane called the tentorium
(covering the cerebellum), on which the cerebrum rests.
[Illustration]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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