"So much for the practical pretensions of our science. The reader must now hear our claims to speculative superiority. Dr. Spurzheim has said, and been most heartily abused for saying--and, if the science be false, most heartily deserves to be abused for saying,--that the whole philosophy of the mind must be entirely changed; that the study of man in this respect will become a new study, &c. In this dictum--most noble or most arrogant, according to events--we (phrenologists) concur, with the loudest cheers; and in this, do we say, lies the stupendous monument of our science. Since the earliest records of philosophy, sages have speculated on the heart, the mind, the passions, and the understanding. For more than three thousand years systems have flashed, and disappeared without leaving a trace. Some of these, indeed, were abundantly ingenious; but were defective in that which alone can make them lasting, truth. It would be curious to examine the hypotheses which have grown up, one after the other, in the fertile soil of fancy, Arabian, Chinese, Persian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and modern European, and to see how specious and how futile all have been. Not one of them was founded on any thing but conjecture; and, until Gall appeared, it was not supposed that mental philosophy, that psychology, ever could have any other basis. But Gall proceeded entirely upon fact; and those who accuse his system as imaginative, will probably call the 'Faerie Queene' an historical poem, and 'Lear' an algebraical tragedy. He stalked from brain to brain, from organ to organ, and trampled conjecture under foot. 'The man of skulls'--aye, Mr. Edinburgh Reviewer, the _boy_ of skulls--endowed in truth, with not less imagination than his predecessors, had yet more love of fact than they had; and this single faculty has placed him above them all. It is, indeed, most wonderous, that the catalogue of the innate faculties of man should have escaped the grey-haired philosophers of every age and climate, and that its first-fold should have been opened to a child of nine years old, who in maturity unrolled it all, except a leaf or two, which he left to his followers. Such a discovery, had it been made by a man after so long concealment, and so many attempts to accomplish it, would have been wonderful; but let it never be forgotten that it was the work, and not the accidental work, of an infant." ADVANTAGES AND OBJECTS OF PHRENOLOGY.