better, the other of much worse developments, the latter should be sentenced to the longest discipline." A writer in the Edinburgh Phrenological Journal, speaking of prisoners, says: "The measure of the restraint ought to bear reference, not so much to the amount of crime actually committed, as to the degree of criminal tendency in the individual.” "Persons having brains of" a certain "class ought to be viewed as moral patients, and treated as such; and the form of their brains, combined with their manifestation of criminal tendencies, should be sufficient to warrant their being subjected to treatment," i. e. confinement. "This," he adds, "is the grand practical principle that must be adopted and acted on, before a successful result in criminal legislation can be reached."

Here, then, we have it, on the highest phrenological authority. Men should be tried, convicted and imprisoned, not so much for actual crime committed, as for their "criminal tendencies," their cranial "developments," the "form of their brains."! "This is the grand practical principle that must be adopted and acted on, before a successful result in criminal legislation can be reached."!! But we have not yet done with the positions of the phrenologists, as to the nature of crime, and desert of punishment. Mr. Combe speaks of three sources of crime, and only three: "First, particular organs are too large, and spontaneously too active; secondly, great excitement produced by external causes; and, thirdly, ignorance of what are uses, and what abuses, of the faculties." And each of these causes, he says, " exists, independently of the will of the offender." The will, therefore, as we might expect on phrenological principles, has nothing to do with the causes of crime at all. It is excluded.

But in excluding the will, it is obvious that Mr. Combe excludes that which is, in fact, the cause of all crime, without which it is impossible that crime should exist. He forgets, or does not consider, what crime is. "It is not simply evil, but evil arising from one definite source; and that the very source which phrenology excludes, viz. the consent of a free, responsible will. The crime of murder, for example, is not simply the killing of a man. The man must be killed maliciously, wilfully, Destructiveness, in the sense of the phrenologists, may be a remote cause; but if it be destructiveness, apart from a responsible and consenting will, as in the case of a maniac, or a ravenous beast, it is not murder. It is, in fact, no crime at all." It follows, from Mr. Combe's theory as to the causes of crime, that there is, in fact, no such

thing as crime; and so we are brought back to the same conclusion as before: The criminal incurs no guilt, and deserves no punishment. He is the mere victim of his nature, and of exter

nal circumstances.

Nor is Mr. Combe alone in this conclusion. It is concurred in, as we have seen, by all the more distinguished phrenologists. Their idea is, that bad dispositions and criminal acts, imply disease, rather than guilt. All wrong character is a brain disorder, as much as fever is a disorder of the body; and we can no more will away the former, than the latter. The words sin, guilt, blame-worthiness, ill-desert, have no place in the nomenclature of these men, as they have no ideas corresponding to them in their philosophy.

And the proper idea of punishment is as foreign from their system, as is that of sin. Punishment, we are told, serves only to "irritate and inflame the propensity which it was designed to check. We might as well undertake to whip a sore, or beat the typhus fever out of the body, or steady a wild horse with spurs," as to reform a vicious mind by punishment. "The only effect will be to chafe the disorder into greater malignity."

The true course, therefore, is, to treat the transgressor as a patient or a lunatic, in the hands of a physician, rather than as a culprit deserving punishment. "Capital punishments should be forthwith abolished; prisons should be turned into hospitals; the rod of the parent and teacher should be laid aside; the diseased, over-worked organs should be put to rest; while their too feeble neighbors should be fed and drilled into activity." Punishment for crime, and reward for well-doing, are both entirely foreign to the system. They "both appeal to the animal feelings, and thus serve to defeat their own proper end, which is to set the moral feelings on the throne."

That we do not misrepresent here the great teachers of phrenology, might be shown, were it necessary, by further quotations. Says a writer in the Edinburgh Journal: "No one would propose to punish a man capitally for being infected with a contagious disease; although by putting him to death, at its first appearance, we might save many lives more valuable than his. Yet it would be as becoming to do this, and thereby protect society from physical contagion, as to guard it from moral contagion, by the destruction of a patient, who was defective in his moral constitution."

Mr. Simpson says: "When penitentiaries shall be held to be hospitals for moral patients, and not engines to protect society, by holding out the spectacle of the sufferings of perfectly free agents, either paying back the loss which their actions have occasioned, or deterring others from crimes by their example; the duration of the convict's detention will depend, not upon the mere act which brought him there, but upon the continuance of his disease." The purport of this long, bungling and obscure passage is, that men are not "perfectly free agents;" that sins and crimes are to be regarded and treated as particular forms of disease; that prisons should be considered as hospitals, and not places of punishment; and that the term of confinement should be regulated, not by the nature of the crime committed, but by the continuance of the disorder.

Mr. Simpson's whole book (and the same is true of Mr. Levison's) is based upon this one idea. Their plan of "efficient protection from crime" is, to lay hold of the offender, on the first breaking out of his disease, and keep him until the remedial process is completed. Murder, they tell us, comes from "homicidal insanity," or " diseased destructiveness. To torment the murderer will not annihilate this propensity. The only remedy is, to stifle the disease, by exciting the other propensities into predominance."

Much has been thought and written, within the last thirty years, on the punishment of crime, and the proper treatment of its perpetrators. A strong sympathy has been awakened for poor criminals, thieves, robbers, murderers, adulterers, because they have been punished in some instances severely, as they deserved. This course of remark, assuming the appearance of great philanthropy and benevolence, was received with some favor for a time; but the public have, at length, become nauseated with it. They see through it; see the folly and mischief of it; and will not tolerate it further. When a man knocks us down upon the highway, and steals our purse; when he fires our dwelling, and destroys our property, and perhaps our family; sensible people cannot see why all the sympathy of the community should be lavished upon him, rather than upon us; why he should be caressed, and cared for, and screened from punishment, and nursed and sheltered in a hospital, at the public expense; while we are left, unprotected, to bear our injuries as best we may.

Sensible people are beginning to inquire, too, as to the cause of these new-fangled notions. Where did they come from? How did they originate? These inquiries, if pursued, will lead directly, and by a very short process, to phrenology. The pernicious notions of which we speak, came in upon us from phrenology. They have been nurtured and strengthened by it. They grow right out of it, as we have seen, and can be removed only by removing the cause. When we return to the plain teachings of the Bible and of common sense on this subject; when we come to regard man as a free, responsible agent, whose acts are his own; when we come to regard him as guilty for his crimes, and deserving of punishment, in proportion to his guilt; when society is left, unembarrassed by the whinings and whimperings of miscalled philanthropists, to inflict such punishment, without the prospect or hope of escape; then the wicked will begin to fear, and crime will begin to diminish, and property and life will be more secure.

We might speak of other social evils growing out of these phrenological speculations, more especially as they bear upon the union of the sexes, and the permanence and happiness of the marriage relation. It would seem from much that we read and hear, that those who have bad heads or disordered bodies, that is, from a fourth to a third of our whole race, ought not to marry at all. Thus, one writer says, and Mr. Combe endorses the statement, that all "persons in any way constitutionally enfeebled, persons predisposed to scrofula, pulmonary consumption, gout, or epilepsy, should conscientiously abstain from matrimony." Or if, in an evil hour, such persons have been married, the union had better be dissolved. These ill-shapen heads and disordered bodies should not be multiplied. There is quite enough of them in the world already.

This doctrine is adapted, if not to prevent or dissolve the marriage relation, to produce discontent and unhappiness in it. A pleasant couple, we will suppose, soon after marriage, submit their heads to the examination of some practised phrenologist, and he decides that they are essentially unlike. One is intellectual, the other stupid. One is gentle, the other obstinate, One is open-hearted and generous, the other selfish and miserly. Now here is a terrible secret laid open to this happy couple. They learn what they did not know before, though they may have been intimately acquainted for years-that they have no

-

congeniality, that they ought never to have come together, and that they have no prospect of living peacefully, much less hap pily. And this revelation of their probable destiny will have a mighty influence in accomplishing it. The more they confide in what has been said to them, and the more they ponder it, the more will their connubial joys be marred, and the cup of life will be embittered.

But we cannot dwell longer on this topic. We must dismiss it with a word, and hasten to the religious bearings of the subject before us. We profess to be a Christian people. We profess to believe and revere the Bible, and to find our religion there. How, then, do the teachings of phrenology compare with those of the Holy Scriptures? How far do they agree together?

The views which have been already presented will enable us to answer these questions, in part. The Bible teaches the existence of a soul, distinct from the body, of another substance from the body, which is to survive the body, and live in a future state. In other words, it sets its face against every form and degree of materialism. When the body returns to the earth, as it was, the spirit is to return to God who gave it. But phrenology, we have seen, if it does not end necessarily in materialism, ends there very frequently, in fact. It has a strong bearing in that direction, and many of its advocates, and those, too, who claim to be most enlightened, are professed materialists. "Immaterial substance," they say, “is a mere abstraction of the human imagination, altogether unknown to our senses or understanding." But so far as phrenology does tend to materialism, its bearings, its tendencies are obviously against the Bible.

Again; the Bible assumes everywhere, that man is a free, responsible agent, that his acts are his own, and that he is justly accountable for them. As much as this is implied in all the commands of Scripture; in its exhortations, warnings, persuasions, motives; and in its repeated annunciations of a coming day, when we must give an account of ourselves to God. But in respect to this matter of moral agency, phrenology teaches quite another doctrine. It denies to man the faculty of will, and represents his actions as the result of his cerebral organization, and of external circumstances; conditions which he did not create, and over which he has no control.

Still again; the Bible speaks of sin, not as a misfortune, or as merely an evil, but as an offence, a wrong, to God, to the universe,