A vindication of phrenology.

  • Williams, W. Mattieu (William Mattieu), 1820-1892.
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A vindication of phrenology. 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.

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    MEMOIR Mr. William Mattibu Williams, F.B.A.S., F.C.S., was born in London, February 6, 1820. At fourteen years of age he was apprenticed to Mr. Thomas Street, a well-known Mathe- matical and Optica] Instrument-maker in Lambeth. To the highly skilled practical mechanical and scientific knowledge thus obtained, the several courses of Cantor lectures, which he much later in life delivered at the Society of Arts, owe much of their value. Prior to his apprenticeship to the art and busi- ness of Mathematical Instrument-making he had spent his schoolboy days at three schools of the ' Academy for young gentlemen ' type, then characteristic of the education of the period. At these schools, to use his own description, he was crammed with the contents of ' Carpenter's Spelling Book,' ' Walkingame's Arithmetic,' ' Lindley Murray's Grammar,' ' Goldsmith's Geography,' and more or less of the ' Eton Latin Grammar,' but he learnt no science at either of the schools, its value as a branch of education being then unappreciated, and its difficulty considered so great as to place it beyond the curriculum of ordinary day-school education. To the combat- ting, practically and theoretically, of these important educa- tional errors a large part of his life was subsequently most successfully devoted. During his apprenticeship period ' long hours ' were the order of the day. He had to work from 7 in the morning until 8 at night; yet he found time to attend the night classes of the then vigorous London Mechanics' Institution in Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane (now the Birkbeck Institution). This meant a sharp run of a mile and a half after the doing of a long day's work. The London Mechanics' Institution was then—1834—in the hey- day of its existence, under the active patronage and assistance of Dr. Birkbeck (President), Lord Brougham, Sir Francis Burdett, Joseph Hume, M.P., Bishop Thirlwall, and other