When the book came out, the medical reviewers were staggered. They dared not attack, and they would not praise it; it was therefore allowed to fall dead from the press. The distinguished baronet, whose book had been thrown over by the publisher, was furious. He threatened to have Vanbrugh’s name taken off the register as a quack. The publisher was wringing his hands, when suddenly an offer arrived from Leipzig for the German rights of the book, an offer larger in amount than what he had paid Vanbrugh for the copyright. Similar offers came tumbling in from Paris, from Rome, and from St. Petersburg. Rival editions appeared in New York and Chicago, the publishers of which, more honest than their legislators, sent considerable sums to the author. The scientific press on both sides of the Atlantic rang with the name of Bernard Vanbrugh, and the popular journals followed suit. As Vanbrugh had foretold, his book superseded every existing treatise on the brain. The first part of the work was a careful and exhaustive monograph on the brain-cells, their morphology and physiology. Vanbrugh had applied every available tool of scientific investigation in his experiments--chemical agents, electric discharges, the microscope, and the photograph. The reaction under the different rays of the spectrum had been tested separately and in combination, and results of the highest interest obtained. But the epoch-making character of the book was given to it by the second part. Here Vanbrugh had boldly essayed the feat of building a bridge between physiology and what is called psychology. He had explored what are known as mental phenomena in the light of his physical analysis. Into this dim and distrusted region of knowledge Vanbrugh had projected the searchlight of his merciless intellect, and had made it scientific ground. Even the lay reader could follow him here, and understand most of his conclusions. Vanbrugh disdained the hieroglyphic vocabulary of the new priesthood of science, and forced the words of daily life into the service. In this part of the book occurred his famous comparison of the brain to a biograph, with the process of thought carried on by a series of films, succeeding each other with inconceivable rapidity, but yet with a gap of pure annihilation after each. “Science is measured knowledge,” was the keynote of his triumphant peroration. “Science is measured knowledge, and the only measures we can apply are physical ones, and we can only apply them to physical phenomena. Slowly but surely, as we succeed in identifying these processes called mental with the processes of the brain-cells, we shall be enabled to reduce them to a plan, to evolve order out of confusion, and to regulate human passion and intelligence as we regulate the secretions of the stomach and the circulation of the blood, the alternation of the harvests, and the courses of the tides.”