Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887: Volume 1, Number 5
Philosophy
Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887: Volume 1, Number 5
Medicine -- Periodicals; Phrenology -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
EXTINCT ANIMALS.--Wonderful bones have been dug up in Spokane County,
Washington Territory--nine mammoths, a cave bear, hyenas, extinct
birds, and a sea turtle. One of the tusks measured twelve feet nine
inches long, and twenty-seven inches round, weighing 295 pounds. Some
of the ribs were eight feet long. The molar teeth weighed eighteen
pounds each. The pelvic arch was six feet across; a man could walk
through it erect. The monster was estimated to be eighteen and
one-half feet high, and to weigh twenty tons.
EDUCATION is making great progress in France. The number of colleges
and the number of children at school are greatly increased. There are
now five and a quarter millions attending primary schools. Politicians
claim that whenever the people in a department are well educated they
become republicans.
GENESIS OF THE BRAIN
(_Continued from page 32._)
Is there anything miraculous or extravagant in believing that this
invisible potentiality, which has such magical transforming and
developing power, but which has never been known to arise from
combinations of matter, has an origin which is, like itself,
spiritual? For we can obtain matter from matter, and spirit from
spirit, but never obtain spirit or life from dead matter.
The genesis of the human brain is therefore a microcosmic epitome of
the macrocosmic evolution, controlled by the "over-soul"--the Divine
power, of which we know so little.
To return to the embryo brain, which gives us visibly the epitome of
the evolution of vertebrated animals,--why is it not also an epitome
of the entire animal kingdom, from the radiata, articulata, and
mollusca to the vertebrata, instead of representing the evolution of
vertebrates alone? It may be so. It may be that man and other animals
in germination pass through _all_ stages, from the lowest to the
highest; but the microscope cannot reveal the fact, for the jelly-like
or fluid conditions of the nervous system during the first month after
conception do not enable us to discover any organization or outline
from which anything can be learned. And yet, from certain interesting
experiments in sarcognomy which have never been performed except by
myself or my pupils, I am disposed to believe that the germinal
process of man goes beyond the beginning of the animal kingdom, and
that he retains in his constitution spiritual elements which might not
improperly be called, not a photograph, but a psychograph of the
entire animal kingdom,--yea, of everything that lives, and even of the
mineral elements that have no life.
These things are wonderful and grand indeed, but the self-sufficient
powers that rule the world of human society have no desire to know
them, and hence I have been content to enjoy them alone, or with a few
enlightened friends.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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