BROWS AND BUMPS.

Auckland Star, Volume LV, Issue 188, 9 August 1924, Page 6

BROWS AND BUMPS.

I v I'hrcnology docs not seem to be. as popular as it. used to be.. Perhaps the gentlemen who go round making a living by telling bumps give most of their time to the country districts, and so do not ! often catch the eye of a city journalist. At any rate, the "science" has received another bump, this time from a speaker at the British Association meeting at Toronto. The shape of the head, he says, in a message we publish to-day, does not indicate quality of intellect; it is not safe to choose a vocation according to your bumps; and low foreheads arc not to be despised. Phrenology, in the old sense of the world, never appealed greatly to scientists. One encyclopaedia refers to if as a pseudo-science, and says that two facts are sufficiently condemnatory, that the surface of the brain is not mapped out into areas corresponding to the "affective propensities" and "sentiments" of the phrenologist; and that the outside shape of the skull does not accurately represent the brain surface. Also, a big head does not always mean a fine brain. When, however, a scientist asks the public to discard its belief that high brows are superior to low brows he. is asking a good deal of it. This would mean the dropping of the very expressive and often convenient Americanism for superior intellect and culture. And what would the comic artist do if he could not draw a professor j with a bulging forehead? Besides, what j happens to the fact (we presume it can be called such) that according to the relics of primitive man wbiclv have come down to us, those early types had narrow foreheads, and that as man has ascended his forehead has become larger? Millet's peasant who inspired Edwin Markham's "The Man With tlie Hoe" has a narrow forehead and a vacant look: Who slanted back this brutal brow? If our professor at Toronto is correct, the question loses its point. Reciters, however, are likely to go on asking the question, and the world will continue, to judge a man by the size and shape of his forehead and other features of his head, even though it does not accept tlie bump of the phrenologist.