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---such he styled himself. He took me round among his patients, and showed me his experiments upon them. He made more of mesmerism in the cure of disease than any other person I had then heard of, and gave me his own theory of the entire series of manifestations.

Proceeding from Manchester, I joined Findlater at Carlisle, and, along with him, spent a fortnight at Rothesay. My next destination was Aberdeen. There, I encountered my old friend, James Straton,

our local phrenologist" -a remarkable man in many ways. He had been occupied in preparing statistics of the brain weight of different classes, ages, occupations, grades of society, etc. What, however, was most interesting was his mode of head measurement. It had long been urged against the phrenologists that, estimating the compartments of the brain, they could not allow for thickness of skull, and, more especially, for the frontal sinus, whose position was such that any irregularity in its thickness threw doubts upon the size of the observing organs. Straton had been at work to grapple with this difficulty. He explained to me verbally what he had been doing to surmount it. He had been allowed to make postmortem examinations, I think in Manchester Infirmary, with a view to determine the relation between the thickness of the skull and the bony

skeleton generally, so as to see if there was a sufficient constancy of proportion between the parts to enable the observer to determine the thickness of the skull in the living subject, by measuring other parts that were accessible to measurement. The method was, undoubtedly, a sound one; and the existence of some such constancy was more than probable. He himself had based upon his numerous dissections a scheme of measurement that he was now applying on the great scale, and by which he had already obtained the statistics referred to. Unfortunately, he did not explain his mode of procedure; although this, I suppose, he would have done, had his life been spared. He stated to me, in round numbers, that he had to take forty measurements of each subject that is to say, the measurements of the head to begin with, and, next, those other measurements that enabled him to assign the thickness of the cranium; the result of the whole being that his estimates were finally given in terms of brain size, even in the living subject. For aught I know, his method died with him. The anthropometry now practised professes only to measure head dimensions-taking for granted that these are, for all practical purposes, a sufficient criterion of size of brain.1

In 1845, Straton had brought out a pamphlet entitled "Contributions to the Mathematics of Phrenology," in which

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JAMES STRATON, AND PHRENOLOGY.

239

Winter Session, 1853-54.

By the end of this year (1853) the Intellect

was nearly finished; there remaining only the concluding chapters on Similarity, and the two subsequent Books. These last became the occupation of the greater part of 1854.

I saw

The Easter vacation of this year coincided with the preparations for the war. I took my holiday in an excursion to Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. The operation of transporting troops from Portsmouth was going on. the 42nd parading before, their departure; everybody's remark being that no regiment could be in finer condition. I spent a few days in the hotel at Bonne Church, and had walks to Ventnor by the Cliff Road. I saw the dockyard at Portsmouth, and went on board the Victory, which was always at anchor. I returned by Chichester to

London.

In the summer months, Clark was a good deal in London, in connexion with college affairs; and I had occasion to meet him frequently at the

he gave different modes of measuring the head, and exemplified the process in great detail from busts and skulls, as well as from living heads-thus preparing extensive statistics from which he drew various inferences. There was still wanting his last refinement of taking into account the thickness of the skull, as stated in the text.

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