joining the “longitudinal columns of the cornua,” account for the results of Brown-Sequard’s sections of the posterior columns.  The physiological experimenter has also made it evident that the decussation of the conductors of sensitive impressions has its seat in the spinal core, and not in the encephalon, as had been supposed.  Not less remarkable than these results are the facts, which I with others of my audience have had the opportunity of observing, as shown by M. Brown-Sequard, of the artificial production of epilepsy in animals by injuring the spinal cord, and the induction of the paroxysm by pinching a certain portion of the skin.  I would also call the student’s attention to his account of the relations of the nervous centres to nutrition and secretion, the last of which relations has been made the subject of an extended essay by our fellow countryman, Dr. H. F. Campbell of Georgia.

The physiology of the spinal cord seems a simple matter as you study it in Longet.  The experiments of Brown-Sequard have shown the problem to be a complex one, and raised almost as many doubts as they have solved questions; at any rate, I believe all lecturers on physiology agree that there is no part of their task they dread so much as the analysis of the evidence relating to the special offices of the different portions of the medulla spinalis.  In the brain we are sure that we do not know how to localize functions; in the spinal cord, we think we do know something; but there are so many anomalies, and seeming contradictions, and sources of fallacy, that beyond the facts of crossed paralysis of sensation, and the conducting agency of the gray substance, I am afraid we retain no cardinal principles discovered since the development of the reflex function took its place by Sir Charles Bell’s great discovery.

By the manner in which I spoke of the brain, you will see that I am obliged to leave phrenology sub Jove,—­out in the cold,—­as not one of the household of science.  I am not one of its haters; on the contrary, I am grateful for the incidental good it has done.  I love to amuse myself in its plaster Golgothas, and listen to the glib professor, as he discovers by his manipulations

   “All that disgraced my betters met in me.”

I loved of old to see square-headed, heavy-jawed Spurzheim make a brain flower out into a corolla of marrowy filaments, as Vieussens had done before him, and to hear the dry-fibred but human-hearted George Combe teach good sense under the disguise of his equivocal system.  But the pseudo-sciences, phrenology and the rest, seem to me only appeals to weak minds and the weak points of strong ones.  There is a pica or false appetite in many intelligences; they take to odd fancies in place of wholesome truth, as girls gnaw at chalk and charcoal.  Phrenology juggles with nature.  It is so adjusted as to soak up all evidence that helps it, and shed all that harms it.  It crawls forward in all weathers, like Richard Edgeworth’s