Elements of phrenology / [George Combe].

  • George Combe
Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Elements of phrenology / [George Combe]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    16/250 page 2
    language. Their dispositions were equally different ; and this diversity appeared also to determine the direc- tion of their partialities and aversions. Not a few of them manifested a capacity for employments which they were not taught: they cut figures in wood, or delineated them on paper; some devoted their leisure hours to painting, or the culture of a garden, while their com- rades abandoned themselves to noisy games, or traversed the woods to gather flowers, seek for birds’ nests, or catch butterflies. In this manner, each presented a cha- racter peculiar to himself ; and Dr Gall observed that the individual who in one year had displayed selfish or knavish dispositions, never became in the next a good and faithful friend. The scholars with whom Dr Gall had the greatest difficulty in competing, were those who learned by heart with great facility; and such individuals frequently gained from him, by their repetitions, the places which he had won by the merit of his original compositions. Some years afterwards, having changed his place of residence, he still met individuals endowed with an equally great talent for learning to repeat. He then ob- served, that his schoolfellows so gifted possessed pro- minent eyes, and recollected that his rivals in the first school had been distinguished by the same peculiarity. When he entered the university, he directed his atten- tion, from the first, to the students whose eyes were of this description, and found that they excelled in getting rapidly by heart, and giving correct recitations, although many of them were by no means distinguished in point of general talent. This fact was recognised also by the other students in the classes; and, although the connec- tion between the talent and the external sign was not at this time established upon such complete evidence as is requisite for founding a philosophical conclusion, Dr Gall could not believe that the coincidence of the two cir- cumstances was entirely accidental. From that period he suspected that they stood in an important relation to
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3