Now, from the best accounts he had been able to get of this matter, he was satisfied it could not be where _Des Cartes_ had fixed it, upon the top of the _pineal_ gland of the brain; which, as he philosophized, formed a cushion for her about the size of a marrow pea; tho’, to speak the truth, as so many nerves did terminate all in that one place, --’twas no bad conjecture; ----and my father had certainly fallen with that great philosopher plumb into the centre of the mistake, had it not been for my uncle _Toby_, who rescued him out of it, by a story he told him of a _Walloon_ officer at the battle of _Landen_, who had one part of his brain shot away by a musket-ball, --and another part of it taken out after by a _French_ surgeon; and after all, recovered, and did his duty very well without it. If death, said my father, reasoning with himself, is nothing but the separation of the soul from the body; and if it is true that people can walk about and do their business without brains, --then certes the soul does not inhabit there. Q. E. D. As for that certain, very thin, subtle and very fragrant juice which _Coglionissimo Borri_, the great _Milanese_ physician affirms, in a letter to _Bartholine_, to have discovered in the cellulæ of the occipital parts of the cerebellum, and which he likewise affirms to be the principal seat of the reasonable soul (for, you must know, in these latter and more enlightened ages, there are two souls in every man living, --the one, according to the great _Metheglingius_, being called the _Animus_, the other, the _Anima_;)--as for the opinion, I say, of _Borri_, --my father could never subscribe to it by any means; the very idea of so noble, so refined, so immaterial, and so exalted a being as the _Anima_, or even the _Animus_, taking up her residence, and sitting dabbling, like a tadpole all day long, both summer and winter, in a puddle, ----or in a liquid of any kind, how thick or thin soever, he would say, shocked his imagination; he would scarce give the doctrine a hearing. What, therefore, seemed the least liable to objections of any, was that the chief sensorium, or head-quarters of the soul, and to which place all intelligences were referred, and from whence all her mandates were issued, --was in, or near, the cerebellum, --or rather somewhere about the _medulla oblongata_, wherein it was generally agreed by _Dutch_ anatomists, that all the minute nerves from all the organs of the seven senses concentered, like streets and winding alleys, into a square.