hygrometer.  It does not stand at the boundary of our ignorance, it seems to me, but is one of the will-o’-the-wisps of its undisputed central domain of bog and quicksand.  Yet I should not have devoted so many words to it, did I not recognize the light it has thrown on human actions by its study of congenital organic tendencies.  Its maps of the surface of the head are, I feel sure, founded on a delusion, but its studies of individual character are always interesting and instructive.

The “snapping-turtle” strikes after its natural fashion when it first comes out of the egg.  Children betray their tendencies in their way of dealing with the breasts that nourish them; nay, lean venture to affirm, that long before they are born they teach their mothers something of their turbulent or quiet tempers.

   “Castor gaudet equis, ovo proanatus eodem
     Pugnis.”

Strike out the false pretensions of phrenology; call it anthropology; let it study man the individual in distinction from man the abstraction, the metaphysical or theological lay-figure; and it becomes “the proper study of mankind,” one of the noblest and most interesting of pursuits.

The whole physiology of the nervous system, from the simplest manifestation of its power in an insect up to the supreme act of the human intelligence working through the brain, is full of the most difficult yet profoundly interesting questions.  The singular relations between electricity and nerve-force, relations which it has been attempted to interpret as meaning identity, in the face of palpable differences, require still more extended studies.  You may be interested by Professor Faraday’s statement of his opinion on the matter.  “Though I am not satisfied that the nervous fluid is only electricity, still I think that the agent in the nervous system maybe an inorganic force; and if there be reason for supposing that magnetism is a higher relation of force than electricity, so it may well be imagined that the nervous power may be of a still more exalted character, and yet within the reach of experiment.”

In connection with this statement, it is interesting to refer to the experiments of Helmholtz on the rapidity of transmission of the nervous actions.  The rate is given differently in Valentin’s report of these experiments and in that found in the “Scientific Annual” for 1858.  One hundred and eighty to three hundred feet per second is the rate of movement assigned for sensation, but all such results must be very vaguely approximative.  Boxers, fencers, players at the Italian game of morn, “prestidigitators,” and all who depend for their success on rapidity of motion, know what differences there are in the personal equation of movement.