Into this field of mystery, Dr. Gall advanced with a courage unknown to his predecessors, and his success was equal to his courage. The entire plan and constitution of the brain were revealed by his anatomical genius, and his successors have but carried further and perfected his anatomical system. His anatomical exposition of the brain, addressed to the French Institute in 1808, is one of the great landmarks of the progress of science--the commencement of a new era; and his exposition of its functions was the solution of a problem which had defied the genius and learning of all his predecessors. His discoveries in anatomy were so great that Reil (himself a brain anatomist of the highest rank, whose name is permanently associated with anatomy by the name "Island of Reil," which belongs to the location in which Gall made his first discovery of the faculty and organ of language), Reil, I say, declared that Dr. Gall had shown him more in his dissections of the brain than he thought it possible for any one man to have discovered in his lifetime; and, in fact, some of the old anatomists, not having been personally instructed by Gall, professed to find it difficult, if not impossible, to unfold the brain after his manner. These discoveries gave Dr. Gall at once a very eminent rank among the learned, for anatomy being a physical science, there never has been any opposition, jealousy, or scepticism against its cultivation among the educated, nor was there anything marvellous in his revelation of cerebral functions, for he studied only the common familiar faculties of men and animals, and never looked into the mysterious and marvellous powers which a more thorough investigation has revealed. Indeed, his reception at first was quite triumphant, and it was not until the death of Gall and Spurzheim, leaving no able and competent representative to carry on their labors, that the drift of medical scepticism and ignorance arrested the progress of his doctrines. I say _ignorance_, for the aversion to the doctrines of Gall was due far more to the ignorance of the profession and their entire neglect of the craniological method than to any other causes. Gall had good reason to be satisfied with his first reception, except as to the hostility of the Austrian government, which suppressed his lectures and compelled him to go abroad, settling finally in Paris, where he again encountered governmental hostility in the unfriendliness of Bonaparte, whose rejection alike of Gall and of Fulton, who wished to introduce steam navigation, demonstrated that great military and political ability may co-exist with great shallowness of mind in reference to all things new, original, and philanthropic. So it has always been, and so it continues.