Note 334 — Chapter IX

One always endeavours to find some former indication or presentiment, although even confused and full of obscurity, beyond the origin of positive science; it is curious to find in the works of the potter physician a sort of germ which, when developed, may have given birth to cranioscopy,—a sort of foresight of the importance which the measurement of the skull would one day acquire. It is in the Recepte Véritable: one of two speakers relates a dream in which he saw the different instruments used in geometry dispute about precedence: he answers them, that man is above them all; they exclaim, that man cannot even use one of them in order to measure any part of his body. [We think it best to give the original here.—Editor.] “Quoy voyant, il me print envie de mesurer la teste d’un homme, pour scauoir directement ses mesures, et me sembla que la sauterelle, la reigle, et le compas me seroient fort propres pour ceste affaire, mais quoy qu’il en soit, ie n’y sceu iamais trouver une mesure asseurée.” Bernard Palissy, Œuvres, p. 93, 12mo, Paris, 1844. Blumenbach says somewhere, “The habit and constant use of my collection of skulls makes me understand every day the impossibility of subjecting a variety of skulls to the rule of any possible angle, the head being susceptible of so many forms, and the parts which compose it being of so many different proportions and directions.” See Morel, Traité des Dégénérescences dans l’espèce humaine, p. 68. M. Aitken Meigs, at the present day, shows no less than twenty-nine different measurements of the skull which must be obtained if we wish to have anything like a satisfactory idea of the same.