A crust for the phrenologists : being a vidimus of lectures on phrenology, purposed shortly to be offered to the public, in which the delusive and unfounded character of that pretended and vaunted science, in both its departments, physical and metaphysical, will be demonstrated / by [Samuel Read].

  • Read, Samuel.
Date:
1842
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A crust for the phrenologists : being a vidimus of lectures on phrenology, purposed shortly to be offered to the public, in which the delusive and unfounded character of that pretended and vaunted science, in both its departments, physical and metaphysical, will be demonstrated / by [Samuel Read]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    ' Here it is seen we have a prominence and a 'swell- ing to guide us. It may be distinguished by the greatest prominence he says ; and by the swelling extending over a portion only of the others. But nothing is said in this place,'or anywhere else in Mr. Combe's book, about how we are to proceed where there is no greatest prominence or swelling— where, to use Mr. Combe's own words, no protu- berance can be perceived. When this is the case then, how, I repeat, are we to proceed ? Where are, then, Mr. Combe's forms and appearances'? They are all blotted out from his sight—they are all swept away and rolled down to the level of the smooth green turf; and although he may indulge his imagination with the pastime of pourtraying and figuring to himself par- terres and serpentines upon that uniform and unvarie- gated surface, there are no parterres there for all that— not a single row of box or willow to relieve the longing eye of the disconsolate and disconcerted Phrenologist ■—not the smallest inequality in the bristling sward, so nicely and neatly is the vapid expanse shaven and cropped.* This doctrine, that the organs encroach upon one another, and vary their situations in each head, is one of their fundamentals ; and is employed by the Phren- ologists to solve cases which would be otherwise ano- malous, and contradict the doctrines. And if there were anything true about their doctrines this must be so, for the organs could not vary their sizes Avithout varying their situations ; and when this happens where several are under one smooth surface nobody can ever know it. Further, it will be shown in these proposed lectures that there is a third impossibility which the Phrenolo- * Fourth Lecture, p.p. 40, 41.