Phrenology, and how to use it in analyzing character.

  • Morgan, Nicholas.
Date:
1871
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Phrenology, and how to use it in analyzing character. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

    60/444 (page 38)
    r€3+—=>- ■Hfh ;8 GENIUS WHETHER PRODUCED BY NATURE OR STUDY. powers of language, but of comprehensiveness of things, as to more tardy minds seem scarcely credible.' Cowley, for instance, wrote a tragedy in his tenth year. Miss Clara Fisher, also, in her seventh year, manifested amazing powers of comprehension and of dramatic talent; and yet, so little were her parents aware of any laborious studies on her part, that they simply affirm, that these talents appeared all at once after seeing a play. Mr. George Bidder, when still a child, manifested his prodigious calculating powers, and in- vented rules for himself, which his teachers could never dis- cover, and which, consequently, he could not have derived from them. Again, turning our attention to invention in the arts and sciences, which we are told is not a gift of nature, but the result of acquired habits, aided by favorable circum- stances, equally contradictory instances occur. During my residence in Paris, I had the pleasure of knowing intimately a man remarkable for his powers of in- vention in music and in mechanics, and who had raised himself to riches by the exercise of these powers. I was at that time studying phrenology, and looking about for infor- mation. I therefore eagerly embraced the opportunity of asking him, whose house was filled with the result of his own inventions, by what habits of study he had formed his genius, and what favorable circumstances had aided him in his career of excellence. He gratified my curiosity, and gave me a history of his life, which seemed, however, to prove that in this case, as in the others, his genius had formed his habits, instead of his habits forming his genius. Instead of being encouraged to follow those occupations in which he was ultimately so successful, he pursued them in