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could not. The waggon-train was defunct. The ordnance turned out a fine body of artillery, but there its work ended. Its stores were of the worst and oldest kind. There were tents of the time of the Peninsula, intrenching tools that a navvy would have laughed at, worn-out carts and antiquated material of many kinds. But there was routine everywhere God save us, there was no lack of that. A most superficial glance might have shown that there was no hope in the departments. They were too old and effete to be revivified; they must be created anew. Everything was out of joint. Where there was not chaos, there was vacuity; where there was not antiquity, there was emptiness. It was evident, then, that though we had a fine lot of fighting men, we were utterly deficient in the means and appliances of providing for them according to the wants and exigencies of a campaign. This was certainly a dilemma for men administering the affairs of a nation on the threshold of war. Was there no remedy? Did the country afford no resources external to the profession? Was there no alternative but to fall back on the worn-out system? Any man living, with his eyes open, in this nineteenth century, might have seen that the age was peculiarly adapted to meet the requirements of the crisis and the shortcomings of our military system. During the time in which our army and its departments were suffering under the pressure of a false economy, there had sprung up a labour power more vast and various than had ever been known before a spirit of enterprise and speculation, which knew nor check nor limit-a manufacturing ability, which laughed at time or quantity. A Chatham would have seized on these at once. Lesser men might have done it. It could scarcely be expected of the least. The country offered everything that was needed. The Government might have dispensed with departments altogether, used them on a limited scale, or waited until they had received new being and organisation. The traffic of the age had produced especially a class of men, migratory, hardy, and restless, who, wandering from one scene of labour

to another, had few ties of place or kindred. These men, inured to toil, and used to contend with the difficulties of a country-accustomed, too, to rude sort of organisation-would have been invaluable as road-makers and pioneers. The plan of the navvies has been adopted now; why not at first? Had the Government expressed its want, how long would it have been ere a body of able men, with a civil officer at their head, would have been ready for any service?-and so on. How long would a demand for warehousemen and wharfingers, to tranship and house the stores of an army, have been announced in the City, or in Liverpool, ere there would have been volunteers enow? How long would our manufacturing firms have been in supplying any quantity or quality of clothing, tents, &c., or our trading men in collecting medicine, wine, &c., necessary for the sick? Would there have not been tenders by the hundred for undertaking the draught and transport work for any time or any distance? Has not a firm volunteered now to furnish meals, ready cooked to our soldiers at any distance from the coast, at the cost of 3s. 3d. a-day per man? Does this firm stand alone in enterprise and patriotism? All these things might have been prepared ere our soldiers were ready. These resources were at hand, but our rulers were too blind to see, too indolent to avail themselves of them. Had they been resorted to, how much of disaster and disgrace might have been spared. Our generals, without anxiety for their communications, commissariat, or transport, might have bestowed all their attention on the discipline and tactics of the army. The soldiers would have marched and fought, with the assurance of finding, when all was over, their camp ready, their supper cooked, their blankets at hand, and of having a change of clothing when the season required it. The cavalry would have found forage for their chargers, and would not have known the mortification of seeing the noble animals which had carried them through a charge, dying from starvation or cold, or degraded to the work of beasts of burden. This, with the past fresh in our memory, seems a Utopian view, yet we have a faith

that it may be realised. We speak not more of the past than for the future. We believe that, in all our military operations, it would be better to trust to the general resources of the country, and the vitality of commercial enterprise, than to depend on departments, which must become inefficient from disuse, or the reductions inevitable in time of peace. These departments might be kept up at a certain standard, just sufficient to meet the immediate wants of an army in the field, whilst the external supplies and distant stores would be intrusted to the civil branches. It is evident that our soldier is too costly a thing to be used for aught besides fighting. We raise him with too much difficulty, and train him at too great cost, to make a pack-horse or a road-maker of him. Our sappers, also, are too few for more than their professional duties. Let all, then, be left to the work for which they are trained, and for other purposes let us seize on the means which civilisation has placed at our disposal. The plan would be costly, says the system. Grant it. But is it better to pay in money or in blood? to have an item in the estimates, or a tale of sick, dying, and dead, such as has of late rent our hearts in twain? We believe, however, that it would be more economical than the blundering bungling methods practised by Government. The other difficulties might have been more easily overcome. A strong Ministry would at once have cut the Gordian knot of the departments have invested the commander-in-chief with a dictatorship which would have enabled him to override the obstacles, formalities, obstructions, and absurdities of office, which would have rendered the executive, whether it existed in the general or colonel of a regiment, paramount. Had such been the case, how different the story! Suppose an order given to a regimental colonel, to march his men to Balaklava, and bring them newly clothed, without heeding any impediment, how long would it have been ere they had returned, each man with a warm suit on? Where there's a will there's a way, even amid the disorder and anarchy of Balaklava; and our word

for it, regimental officers would have found it.

In the matter of patronage, Ministers, too, have been acting under an infatuation destructive even to their protegés. It was said, happily enough, in some print or periodical, that they had insisted on putting round men into square holes, square men into round ones. And so they have. We had few tried men to choose from. Our Caffre and Indian campaigns afforded some; yet these were set aside, with. the exception of one or two brigadiers or generals of division. Where were the men most wanted-the men who had experience in the conveyance and transport of baggage and camp equipage, so essential to the march of an Indian army? Were there none such? We suppose not; for in the places where they should have stood were thrust men who had spent all their lives in the Guards, or on the staff, and had no knowledge or conception of the duties appertaining to adjutantgeneral and quartermaster - general, with all the long following of deputy and assistant ditto. Far be from us a wish to exclude our aristocrats from sharing the dangers and honours of our battle-fields, but we would have them in fitting places-with their regiments, or as aides-de-camp. It was unfair to them, and unjust to the country, to place them in positions for which they had no experience or aptitude, and thus expose them to an undeserved odium.

How long shall The System livehow long? The public voice has doomed it; but evils live long in England after condemnation. We are a people loth to slay. Die it must. Its life is the death of England's glory. Our honour demands the sacrifice. Our soldiers look imploring from their sickbeds and their shelterless tentspoint to the heights of Alma, and of Inkermann, and say, Shall we receive such things at your hands? Will no one stand between the living and the dead, and save us? Shall we stay our hands until some worse thing befall us until more terrible lessons are written on death-beds, in hospitals, and in the ghastly mounds which strew the plains where our soldiers have stood in the pride of victory?

PSYCHOLOGICAL INQUIRIES.

By this time everybody has read Sir Benjamin Brodie's interesting little volume. Everybody, at least, should read it. There are no professional terms to embarrass, and no crabbed style to repel, the reader. It might lie with as much propriety and fitness upon a lady's table as on the student's desk. It can weary no one, it will instruct most, it will suggest something to all.

No introduction to the reader's notice of it is now necessary on our part; neither do we feel disposed to enter into minute or captious criticism. We hold that such men as Sir Benjamin Brodie do a great service to the public by enunciating in a simple manner their own conclusions upon subjects which interest us all, and on which they have had some peculiar opportunities of forming an opinion. When they do this with good faith, it would be both unjust and impolitic to encounter them with the same critical requisitions which it would be fair and necessary to make, in the case of one whose main business in life had been the composition of a treatise on philosophy. Our purpose, therefore, is, to pass on at once to some few remarks on the subjects themselves which this agreeable volume treats of, and which it has, in part, suggested.

What sort of instrument is it which in the brain is committed over to the mind? Such is the question we should put; and we will endeavour to contribute something towards framing the fitting answer. Speaking of the brain from a psychological point of view, it is impossible to avoid expressions which, taken apart and interpreted literally, would trench upon the sole prerogatives of the mind. When we describe an organ or a nerve as the seat of consciousness,"-or of sensation, which is one form of consciousness, we might, if literally interpreted, be supposed to assign to the physical organisation psychical properties which belong (in man) to that spirit which has taken up its re

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sidence, and manifests its high activities in the body. But, in fact, when we speak of the nerve being the seat of sensation, we are not, at that moment, viewing it with relation to the mind, but comparing it with other parts of the vital organism. Compared with a bone or a blood-vessel, it is the seat of sensation. The author before us occasionally uses this very form of expression, and, if we mistake not, has, in one place, designated the brain as "the sole seat of consciousness;" yet no one could be more precise and emphatic in his strict maintenance of the dualism of mind and body.

"Crites. Ergates regards the brain, properly so called, as the physical organ by means of which alone (to use his own expression) the one indivisible percipient and thinking being, which each of us feels himself to be, maintains its communication with the external material world."

When, therefore, we shall have occasion to speak of the brain, or some portion of it, as the organ of memory

or the nerve, together with some other portion of the brain, as the seat of sensation-we claim to be interpreted in strict accordance and consistency with the passage we have just quoted.

And, first of all, we have to make an observation, simple enough, and which will wear to many the air of a truism, and which yet, in our subsequent inquiries, will be found to be of considerable importance. The contents of the human consciousness may be divided into two great classesThoughts and Sensations. So far as the brain is the organ of thought (and we agree with Sir Benjamin Brodie in regarding it as essential to the exercise of memory), it is a special or complete organ, and may be described as the sole seat of memory. But in relation to sensation the case is very different. Here it only forms a part of the organ. The nerve, with its ganglion, is the organ

Psychological Inquiries; in a Series of Essays intended to Illustrate the Mutual Relations of the Physical Organisation and the Mental Faculties.

1855.]

Psychological Inquiries.

of sensation. In the language of some writers, all that portion of the nerve, from the point at which it quits the central organ to its extreme distribution, is called its periphery; and then it would be stated (as we find it is in Romberg) to be the very law of sensation, that it is felt"in the periphery of the sensitive fibre." With regard, therefore, to sensation, the brain, essential as it is, cannot be described as the sole seat of consciousness; it is that central ganglion, a union with which is necessary for the sensitiveness of the nerve-without which the nerve ceases to be a nerve; but if either part of the divided and destroyed organ could be contemplated by itself, it would be more accurate to speak of the periphery of the nerve as being peculiarly the seat of sensation. Touch is felt always in the skin; internal sensations, though more vaguely located, always in the body; it is the eye that sees; it is the ear that hears. Cut off the communication between the retina and the brain, and its susceptibility is gone; you have destroyed the organ, which consisted of the retina together with But if some portion of the brain.

there are degrees of erroneous expression, it is a less error to speak of the retina as being the seat of vision than to apply such an expression to any portion of the brain.

The same remark must be made with regard to all our motor nerves. It is by their connection with the brain that, first co-ordinate, and then voluntary movement becomes possible. But the harmonious movement of many muscles is the result of this connection; it is no especial or exclusive attribute of the brain. When the reflex action takes place from the spinal cord, the only phenomena we have are irritability and motion; when from the central organ, we have also sensation, both preceding the muscular motion and accompanying it -for there is no sensation more distinct than that of muscular exertion, whether we ascribe it to a combined action of many sensitive nerves, or describe it at once as the specific sensation of the motor nerve; which, like the optic nerve, may be non-sensitive to ordinary stimulants, and yet susceptible to some specific impres

sions arising from the action of the
But the gathering up of
muscle.
these nerves into the brain is not only
necessary to what is strictly called
voluntary motion, (which implies their
union with an organ of memory), but
their congregation together in one
central ganglion is evidently connect-
ed with that sympathy or harmony
of action which takes place prior to,
and independently of the develop-
ment of memory, and which we can
only trace to the great laws of animal
life. Here the brain simply provides
that union of many pairs of sensitive
and motor nerves which is necessary
for their related and harmonious ac-
tion.

We shall find it necessary to bear these truths in mind when we come to speak of the brain as the organ of our instincts or appetites, or of locomotion, or, according to the very extraordinary expression now current in the books, as "the organ for the coordination of muscular movements."

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It may be as well to state at once the best conclusion to which some atWe are unable to retention to a very difficult subject has conducted us. gard the brain with any distinctness except under two aspects: 1. As the organ of memory, or that association of ideas which may be described as a development of memory. 2. As the centre of the whole nervous tem. With every part of this, whether nerves of special sense, or of what is called general sensation-whether nerves of voluntary motion, or what is called the sympathetic nerve, it is intimately connected. As to our feelthe brain ings, they are, so far as is concerned, resolvable into memories and sensations, to be distributed accordingly; or they must be placed altogether out of the brain, having their seat only in the spiritual essence.

We are not aware that there is anything in this statement opposed to the views which Sir Benjamin Brodie has put forth in the volume before us, except that its author introduces two special cerebral organsone for speech, and one for locomotion, much too hastily, as we thinkand that he appears disposed to overestimate the functions of the brain as the central portion of the whole nervous system. But even this is rather shown

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"A large extravasation of blood within the head, by the pressure which it causes on the brain, induces a state in which there is a total insensibility to all external impressions, and at the same time an entire suspension of the influences of volition. But the effect of a similar injury of the spinal chord is widely different. The parts below the injury, the communication of which with the brain is thus interrupted, are deprived of sensibility. The muscles are no longer subjected to the dominion of the will, although they may still contract on the application of mechanical stimuli or electricity. The lower limbs may be made to start by tickling the soles of the feet. But these motions are merely automatic, and we have no reason to believe that they are attended with sensation or preceded

by volition, any more than those of the

leaves of the Mimosa sensitiva. At the

same time, in those parts which are above the injury, and whose nervous communication with the brain is not interrupted, the sensibility and power of voluntary motion are unimpaired, as are also the mental faculties. Singular, indeed, is the condition of the individual in whom there has been a laceration, or equally severe injury of the spinal chord, in that part of the neck which is immediately below the origin of the nerves belonging to the diaphragm. In him, respiration, though imperfectly performed, continues, so that life may be maintained during a period

which varies from twenty-four hours to five or six days. He retains his consciousness, he can see and hear and comprehend what passes around him; but, except his head and the upper part of his neck, his body is as if it did not belong to him. He is a living head, and nothing more. I saw a lady under these circumstances with her mind as active, her sympathy with others, and her sense of duty as perfect as before the injury had occurred."

"A living head and nothing more." But we must add there were living eyes and living ears, as well as a living brain; and with regard to that part of the system where the nerve was destroyed, the head was just as dead as the body. Sir Benjamin continues

"We must regard," (continues our author,)" the animal appetites and instincts as being intimately connected with the

nervous system, and as having their spe cial places allotted to them in it. But we are not warranted in having the same conclusions as to the emotions and passions, properly so called. Hope and fear, joy and sorrow, pride and shame, these and such as these are conditions of the mind which have an abstract or independent existence; but which, as they may be superadded to our perceptions and thoughts, admit of being excited and acted on through the medium of the nervous system. At the same time, as far as we can see, they have no special locality in it."

The last sentence or two of this quotation is not very clear; there is perhaps no sensation of the human frame which is not capable of being reproduced in some degree by the reaction of thought, or memory. Now, if instinct and appetite have their place in the nervous system, such of our simple passions as immediately concern these, such as can be fairly analysed into a memory and an appetite, would be as fairly distributed between the brain and the nervous system. There are higher emotions which accompany the faculty of reason, which we should be loth to connect with our organisation at all, except with the brain as organ of memory.

No part of Sir Benjamin Brodie's book will probably have left a more than his attack upon the current sysdistinct impression upon the reader formidable objections from the science tem of phrenology. He selects two of comparative anatomy, one of which seems imperatively to demand a new arrangement of the phrenological map; the more animal passions having been placed in that posterior region of the brain, which is peculiarly developed in man. But, as arguments drawn from comparative anatomy cannot be conclusive against the phrenologist, until it is demonstrated how far "similarity of structure" is proof of "identity of function," we see very plainly that the phrenologist has a mode of escape; and of this mode of escape, he has already very dexterously availed himself. Comparative anatomy, he admits, or sometimes admits, to have been his guide or auxiliaryto have intimated to him where to look, and what organ to look for; but then his real proof of any phrenologi

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