Several copies of verses are dispersed throughout these volumes; few of them are without indications of poetical force, but they are mostly so rough that we think no critical friend would have advised the author to retain them. The best fragments are those in the simplest measure-of which one specimen may suffice: 'September woods, September skies, so soft and sunny all! Than such a smile o'er Summer dead,—so green a winding-sheet! Of the tales, as tales, by far the best seems to us to be that of The Daughter of the Doomed Family' at the beginning of the second volume. In this there is deep interest, sustained with excellent skill, and all the interest is perfectly legitimate. If we except a certain story in The Doctor, &c.,' we have not met, in recent literature, with a more touching miniature romance. Our next favourite is that of The Hermit Vicar,' in volume the third, where again there occurs nothing-we mean nothing in the structure of the fable-with which the most delicate reader can take offence; but the pure passions of gentle hearts are worked out with that power of real tragedy which seldom, if ever, fails to leave at the close a soft and soothing impression on the mind. Had Mr. Downes given us ten such tales as these, and omitted all his diatribes on temporary politics, we venture to say his volumes would have at once attained a high place in public favour. As they stand, we hope they will have a measure of success sufficient to encourage further and more judicious exertion of his remarkable talents. ART. VIII.-Outlines of Phrenology. By George Combe, Esq., President of the Phrenological Society. Edinburgh. 8vo. 1836. THIS is very kind of Mr. President Combe. There are many readers who could not possibly be brought to encounter even one octavo volume upon the science over which this gentleman presides; and here he has given them a pamphlet-brief, cheap, and containing, what to most of them, we suspect, will prove quite sufficient, a compendium of the principles of phrenology. We have perused the document with patience, and shall take this opportunity of investigating the principles of phrenology, with a brevity corresponding to the account here presented of them. We wish, in the first place, to point attention to the following glaring contradiction, if not in the system of phrenology, at least in the language of its teachers. The brain, we are told, is divided into a number of distinct organs, the material instruments of thought. There are the perceptive organs, whose objects are such as form, colour, number, and place; there are the reflective organs, called by the names of causality and comparison; and there are organs of propensities and sentiments, such as those of destructiveness and benevolence. Each of these organs is said to be as strictly limited to its peculiar object as the eye to light, or the ear to sound. Yet no sooner are they represented in operation-no sooner is the cerebral machinery set to work, than those very organs which were described as limited, it may be to a solitary sentiment, are found to be invested with half the faculties of the human head. The optic nerve,' says Mr. Combe, when stimulated by light, induces the active state called seeing in the mind; and the organ of benevolence, excited by an object of distress, produces the mental state called compassion.'-(p. 3.) What light, therefore, is to the optic nerve, an object of distress is to the organ of benevolence. But an object of distress is only known to be such from certain circumstances which indicate the presence of pain or misery; and the organ of benevolence, in order to become cognizant of its appropriate object, must be capable of perceiving the external form of things, their hue, their locality—and must be endowed, moreover, with some capacity of reasoning to draw from these the necessary conclusion. We shall be told that the perceptive and reflective organs perform these offices-that they represent the pallor of countenance, the emaciation of frame-and decide on the connexion between these appearances and the existence of disease or affliction. But the organ of benevolence must itself also understand the picture thus produced before it. There is no conceivable manner in which an image of affliction can become become the object of the organ of benevolence, but by being perceived and understood; and thus the instrument of a single feeling is found to be invested with the greater part of the faculties of the human mind. If the productions of one organ are represented as the objects of another, it follows that every organ, as we ascend in the scale of mental development, must, in order to be affected by its own specific object, be endowed not only with its own peculiar faculty, but with those of the previously developed organs. Thus the reflective organs must be capable of perception, and the sentimental both of perception and of reasoning. What now becomes of that nice division of our intellectual functions amongst the several portions of the brain, which constitutes the very essence of phrenology? After allotting out the faculties of the mind to separate independent organs, it is discovered that these organs have usurped other powers than their own, and have often become, as it were, little minds of themselves. We will endeavour to extricate the phrenologist from a difficulty which at the very outset threatens the confusion and overthrow of his system; but we can extricate him only by divesting his hypothesis of that convenient ambiguity of language which disguises its naked absurdity. As the real object of an organ of sense of vision, for instance-is not the tree, or the human form which we seem instantaneously to behold-(this object being composed of the remembered intimations of several senses which are brought rapidly before us by their association with the sensation of colour)—but merely the impulses received on the retina by the particles of light; so, in phrenology, it is not the image of distress which ought to have been described as the object of the organ of benevolence, but the impulse received from the activity of other organs of the brain-as of form, colour, and comparison-whose activity again might be traced to the vibrations of the organs of sense, which last are affected by the operations of the external world. This is the only intelligible manner in which the system of the phrenologist can be stated. Here the analogy between his organs of thought and those of the senses, is strictly preserved. As vibrations communicated to the optic nerve produce the sensation of colour-so pulsations, communicated from one part of the brain to another, produce in each portion of the cerebral substance a peculiar mode of thought or feeling. When, however, the matter is stated thus broadly, we think we sec sufficient reason why the phrenologist should seek a shelter in the obscurities of language; for what can be more improbable or grotesque, than the hypothesis here presented to our view! A number of distinct and conflicting organs are set in motion by each each other, creating each its own especial feeling or cogitation. This is a machinery for madness, not an organization for a reasonable being. It reminds us of nothing higher-nor can we find a similitude more fitting-than the bells of a household which have been waggishly tied together, so that one being pulled, the whole peal goes off in a continuous clatter. The phrenologist, we suppose, will content himself with asserting that this body of independent organs act on each other after such laws, and form together so harmonious and amicable a republic, as to produce all the order and congruity observed in the human mind. We cannot demonstrate the absolute impossibility of this, knowing, as we do, so little of these organs of thought. He claims the benefit of the utter darkness of his subject, and we yield it him. Admitting, then, the possibility of his system, we proceed to make our observations-first, upon the list of organs which the phrenologist has set forth as containing a classification of mental phenomena; and, secondly, on the evidence by which the existence of these organs is professedly established. In criticising the phrenological theory as a new account of the human mind, we shall avoid, as much as possible, all reference to the peculiar tenets of any one school of metaphysics, and appeal only to those facts which every intelligent man will be ready to admit. We shall not require the categories of Kant to be marshalled on the forehead, or exact that the skull be mapped out into the few large provinces which the analysis of Brown, or of Mill, might teach us to expect. We shall shun all disputable ground; but at the same time let it be remarked, that the phrenologist is not released, more than any other metaphysician, from the difficulties which beset the subject of mental philosophy. He boasts, indeed, of appealing to the palpable experience of eyesight and the touch; but this experience is nothing but inasmuch as it corresponds to the reports of his own consciousness. In making up his list of organs, he must continually refer for their verification to that fine internal experience of his own mental operations, on which the science of metaphysics is founded, and over which so much doubt is supposed to hang. Let no one imagine that, in embracing phrenology, he has escaped from all the perplexities of psychological investigation, and landed at once on the terra firma of natural philosophy. We have no desire to fasten upon the phrenologist the charge of materialism. If he object to the accusation, he is at liberty to avoid it by acknowledging that there is, or there may be, a spiritual substratum, in which inhere the thoughts and feelings produced in it by the cerebral organs. The existence of this spiritual substratum substratum is a question that stands out quite by itself; and it is a question, we are willing to concede, which is not peculiar to an inquiry into the nature of the human mind-to the science of anthropology-but which may be canvassed in relation to all animal life. Take the instance of a simple sensation in a creature of the lowest ranks of zoology. A nerve touched produces a sense of pleasure or pain. Does the nerve feel, it may be asked, or does the sensation exist in some immaterial essence, which feels through the instrumentality of the nerve? We ask exactly the same question when we inquire of the phrenologist, whether the brain thinks, or whether thought inheres in some totally different substance, which cogitates through the medium of the brain? The phrenologist will be satisfied, we presume, if we allow him to have proved the same intimate connexion between his organ of causality, for instance, and the process of reasoning, as exists between the nerve of the animal and its sensation. He need not take upon himself to deny that a spiritual power pervades both the one and the other. Its But though we will not dwell on the imputation of materialism, which may possibly be offensive, yet we beg it to be remembered that, according to the phrenologist, every mental condition, in whatever substance it inheres, is the immediate product of a material organ. The intelligence has no operation of its own. faculties its varied states of consciousness-the psychological phenomena, by whatever term we signify them-are the result of a number of independent organs; and the word mind (when not applied to that occult essence of which we have been speaking) can be only an expression for the totality of these results. This it will be found indispensable to keep always in view, while investigating the problems of phrenology. The phrenologist, when he ascribes all the mental phenomena to certain organs, must be assured that they are equal to the task allotted them. He must not, after this, leave anything to be done by a sort of general agent called the mind. We require, then, of these cerebral organs of the phrenologist, that, on the one hand, they should not be redundant, and, on the other, that they should be sufficiently numerous to perform all those intellectual operations which manifestly are performed. Now, we think it impossible for any one to run his eye down the list of them without perceiving that it supplies us, on some occasions, with superfluous organization-and is, on others, lamentably deficient. A few instances of each of these failings must suffice. We have both Form and Size. In the language of metaphysics, a knowledge of extension includes the two. For what is form but the |