But it is painful to the negro, perhaps more so than hanging would be, for while the local susceptibility of the skin makes him feel the slightest punishment in this respect, the obtuse sensibility of the brain and nervous system generally would enable him, as is often manifest, to bear hanging very well. Those who can remember being flogged in childhood will also remember the great pain that it gave them, though now in their adult age they would laugh at such a thing. The negro is a child forever, a child in many respects in his physical as well as his mental nature, and the flogging of the negro of fifty does not differ much, if any, from the flogging of a child of ten, and while the British soldier or Russian would receive his three hundred lashes without wincing, the big burly negro will yell more furiously than a school-boy when he receives a dozen cuts with an ordinary switch. CHAPTER XI. THE BRAIN. The brain is the seat or the centre of the intellect, in short, the mental organism. The “school men” believed that mind, intellect, the reasoning faculty, whatever we may term it, had no locality or organism, but, on the contrary, was some impalpable, shadowy, unfixed principle that existed as much in the feet or hands as in any other portion of the body. And even Locke and Bacon, while they promulgated the great truths of inductive philosophy, were not sufficiently grounded in its elementary principles to understand clearly the foundation of their own doctrines. Nor did Dugald Stuart, Dr. Brown, or even the great Kant, of more modern times, understand any better the fixed truths on which rest the vast and imperfect systems of philosophy which they labored so assiduously to build up in their day. It remained for Gall, Spurzheim, and their followers to do this—to demonstrate certain great elementary truths which form a foundation, eternal as time itself—for the mental phenomena to rest upon, and whatever advance may be made hereafter in the study of these phenomena, its basis is immovable. Metaphysicians were wont to shut themselves up in their libraries and to analyze their own emotions, etc., which when noted down, became afterwards the material for ponderous lectures or the still more ponderous volumes inflicted on society. Rarely, perhaps, were these speculations connected with the brain—indeed it is a rare thing to find a physiologist indulging in metaphysical speculation, while the most famous among the “philosophers” were profoundly ignorant of that organ, though they fancied they knew all about its functions! The man that should undertake to write a treatise on respiration, and at the same time was utterly ignorant of the structure of the lungs, or to give a lecture on the circulation, while he knew nothing of the blood vessels, would certainly be laughed at, and yet innumerable volumes have been written, and