DEAR DAVID,

I AM extremely delighted to observe how much effect the craniological remarks, so liberally, yet so modestly, distributed over the surface of my correspondence, have been able to produce upon you. I once thought you had the organ of stubbornness and combativeness very luxuriantly brought out, but shall from henceforth be inclined to think I had been mistaken in my observation of your head. My best advice to you in the meantime is, to read daily with diligence, but not with blind credulity, in Dr Spurzheim's book, which, I rejoice to hear, you have purchased. Pass your fingers gently around the region of your head, whenever any new idea is suggested to you by his remarks, and I doubt not you will soon be a firm believer, that “there are more things in heaven and earth than we once dreamt of in our philosophy.”

The aversion which you say you at first felt for the science is, however, a natural, and therefore I cannot help regarding it as a very excusable sort of prejudice. The very names which have been bestowed upon the science—Cranioscopy and Craniology—to say nothing of the still coarser Schädellehre (or skull doctrine) of its first doctor and professor, are disagreeable terms, on account of their too direct and distinct reference to the bones. They bring at once before the imagination a naked skull, and in persons who have not been trained to the callousness of the dissecting-room, conceptions of a nature so strictly anatomical, can never fail to excite a certain feeling of horror and disgust. I am glad to find that this feeling had been sanctioned by antiquity; for, in some quotations from Athenæus, which fell casually into my hands the other day, it is expressly mentioned, that the Greeks considered it as “improper to speak of the physical substances of the head.” I perfectly enter into the spirit of tastefulness and wisdom, which suggested such a maxim to that most intellectual people. Among them the doctrine of pure materialism had not merely been whispered in mystery in the contemplative gardens of Epicurus; it had gone abroad over the surface of the people, and contaminated and debased their spirit.