The only opportunity for fairly studying this question was at the period when people wore artificial hair; for then any well-disposed person had only to pull off his wig, and _show you his mind_.[17] But the hair is a sort of natural mask to the head. The craniologist indeed ‘draws the curtain, and shows the picture:’ but if there is the least want of good faith in him, the science is all abroad again. Unfortunately for the credit due to his system, Dr. Spurzheim (or his predecessor, Dr. Gall, who got up the facts) has very much the air of a German quack-doctor. He is, so to speak it, the Baron Munchausen of marvellous metaphysics. His object is to astonish the reader into belief, as jugglers make clowns gape and swallow whatever they please. He fabricates wonders with easy assurance, and deals in men ‘whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders, and the anthropophagi, that each other eat.’ He readily admits whatever suits his purpose, and magisterially doubts whatever makes against it. He has a cant of credulity mixed up with the cant of scepticism—things not easily reconciled, except by a very deliberate effort indeed. There is something gross and fulsome in all this, that has tended to bring discredit on a system, which after all has probably some foundation in nature, but which is here overloaded with exaggerated and dogmatical assertions, warranted for facts. We doubt the whole, when we know a part to be false, and withhold our assent from a creed, the great apostle of which wants modesty, candour, and self-knowledge! Another thing to be considered, and in truth the great stumbling-block in the way of nearly the whole of this system, is this, that the principle of thought and feeling in man is one, whereas the present doctrine supposes it to be many. The mind is one, or it is infinite. If there is not some single, superintending faculty or conscious power to which all subordinate organic impressions are referred as to a centre, and which decides and reacts upon them all, then there is no end of particular organs, and there must be not only an organ for poetry, but an organ for poetry of every sort and size, and so of all the rest. This will be seen more at large when we come to details; but at present I wish to lay it down as a corner-stone or fundamental principle in the argument. Of the way in which Dr. Spurzheim clears the ground before him, and disarms the incredulity of the reader by a string of undeniable or equivocal propositions blended together, the following may serve as a specimen.