SCIENCE UP TO DATE

Evening Star, Issue 15139, 22 March 1913, Page 8

SCIENCE UP TO DATE

MISCELLANEOUS RECENT ADVANCES. [By James Colli-ek.] (Special Rights Secured by the ' Star.') No. 20. LOCALISATION~OF CEREBRAL FUNCTIONS. A good many 1 years ago, one summer's morning, three university students found themselves together at a military review in the Queen's Park, Edinburgh. * Perhaps the brightest and liveliest of the group was one Jamie Ferrier, as he was familiar recalled, on the eve of becoming Dr Ferrier. His talent was manifest, and wo wero not in the least surprised when, only a. few years afterwards, he was appointed professor of Forensic Medicine in King's College, London. He soon won his spurs. In tho liot summer of 1876, when the writer was on a. walking lour on tho Continent, the English newspapers brought, us an account of a sensation made, bv Professor Ferrier at the meeting of the British Association in that year. He had there read a paper on the'"localisation of functions in the brain that marked a new departure in science The old Phrenology was dead—dead of a. fa.lso psychology and an impossible physiology, "but a* new Phrenology had risen out of its ashes. It was not me.ro speculation, like the pseudo-science it had .superseded, but was founded on experiment. Vivisecting dogs and rabbits in his London laboratory, Corner believed that ho had discovered the seat in the brain of the organs that controlled certain motor activities and other mental functions. Next vear a book containing a full account of' his experiments and their results was published, and it deepened the impression made bv the reading of the paper. As I well" remember. Herbert .Spencer arranged a. meeting, one Sunday morning, with Dr Jdughlings Jackson another accredited worker in the same hold, in order to ascertain how far Ferrier's views were accepted bv other .specialists. J he sensation made bv Ferrier prov?d his misfortune. A public" attention , v; „ attracted to the proceedings of the experimentalists who were inflicting gratuitous suffering on harmless or devoted creatures An agitation, led by Hutton of the Spectator' and Misi Frances Power Cobbe, was got up, and the. Conservative Government of the dav passed a bill requiring that experimenters on animals nml licensc f,om the Home Umax Ihc Homo Secretary of the day was lv. A. Crosse, a masterful minister who reused licenses much oftencr than ho granted them. The new science was nipped in, the bud ; it migrated to Paris Leipzig,and Berlin ; and Ferrier abandoned it m despair. Ho is still, ] think, an efficient professor and a high-class medical praet.Uonorin London; but he reminds ono of Lydgate in 'Middleman*,' who declmeu from being a possible discoverer after tne order of fiichat into being the popular physician of a fashionable watering place. IN GERMANY. The dawning science fled discomfited to Germany. J.hero Goltz and Hitzig (who always, one remembers, jealously ig nored the work of l ; err.er) took up the running. Bv them, mainly or largely, it was ascertained that the cortex (a term first current m the seventies), tho uppermost or gray laycr in tlio brain, was tho .scat of conRHOusncss. In the last decade of the century- tho microscopic study of the brain and also its pathological study, wero carried so far, especially by Fledisig, as to enable a fresh, treatment of the problems deserted by Ferrier to lie made. THE NEW PHRENOLOGY. The.four chief senses of tonch, smell sight, and hearing, have been localised in the, vertical, frontal, occipital, and temporal lobes respectively. In these four localities and closely connected with those four organs, are placed the four thought-centres or centres of association, organs of consciousness, reason, judgment, and will ihese receive and work up the products ot the central sense-organs, and of them the great occipital-temporal centre of association" is the most important. It is* in fact, the supreme or governing portion of the bram, the organ of its constructive and highest faculties. TN ENGLAND. British science appears at last to be reawakening to the. interest, of this field of research, and just at this point has it taken up the subject. At the meeting of the British Association at Dnndoe Professor Elliott Smith stated in an attractive manner somo important lesults of his own inquiries. At the out-set be breaks awav from the German masters. Flechsig declares that in man specific structures are found that arc wanting in tho higher animals. Dr Elliott Smith finds equally in the cortical area of the higher mammals and m man an organ which he calls tho neopallium, and in both it. has undergone enormous expansion and differentiation. Itis a central unifying organ, and it- sits, like a telephone exchange, at the centre of ! our conscious life. All the sense-organs i flash thither their messages, or pour into it a constant stream of impressions—visible, tactual, audible, and so forth. It is a receiving apparatus for storing these impressions. Every portion of it is linked by the most intimate bonds with all the rest, _ It "acts as a whole, though each part is so placed as to receive, and transmit to the others its special " contribution to tho sum-total of our conscious life. It not only receives sense-impressions, but, controls the voluntary response of the muscles through its command of the motor area. ITS PSYCHOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE

If this new organ or. alternatively, FJechsig's oceipiUl-tempond centre bo established, a groat stop will bo taken. It bas been the opprobrium of the empirical school in Psychology that it lias found no place for the ego. "That is Victor Cousin's contention against Locke, sustained through a wholo volume. It is rxpmlly true of Hobbes beforo him. as of Hartley and the two Mills after him. Even Sponeer did not believe in tho moulding activity and governing power of the self Once he gave mo an essay Font him by a contemporary Italian philosopher, G. Ferri, directed against bis view, desiring to bear the gist, of the argument. When he had heird it, ho briofly stated, his own conception of the. matter. There, is no ego. Every new sentation or perception, emotion or volition, links'* on to ail previous serrations and perceptions, emotions and volitions, and fits into the framework they have built up. The ego that. 6eems to react on tho materials of consciousness is a part of those materials, and it reacts on lhom in virtue of its superior quality or greater strength. There is no will, but only the imperious or disputed mastery of a stronger motive. Let that motive fall into abeyance, and the so-called will would be powerless.

Great issues may seem to be at stake. If there is no ego, can there be> a eoul; still more, an immortality of tho soul? The Buddhist who brands belief in an individuality as a heresy says, yes; most religions persons would say no. * But if it can be shown that, as Descartes believed the soul to be situated in the pineal gland, a similar controlling organ has been rightly located in the brain, will not that be a discovery of crucial importance? Unfortunately, we. cannot yet confidently assume that Professor Elliott Smith's neo-palliuxn is anything more than a hypothesis. Its discharge- of the functions assigned to it is still largely hypothetical. ANDREW LANG. Professor Elliott Smith took the place of perhaps the most variously accomplished man of letters that Scotland, has produced since Sir Walter Scott. Andrew Lang was the president-designate nf the section of Anthropology at last meeting of the British Association, but death intrrposed his final veto. Nephew of a great classical scholar, Professor Sellar, ho was a scholar in that restricted sense and also in a very wide sense*. Translator of Homer and vindicator of his ruiity, introdncer of Herodotus and Aristotle, he was akq a> poet, of romantic

if of classical themes, a historian, a biographer, a novelist, an essayist and reviewer—a polygraph, in short. Ho came io London, I "well remember, as a J i fenny adventurer in the eoveotios, from Morton* College-, Oxford, where he had just vacated a fellowship by marrying a wifo. Ho at once found a place on" tho 'Daily iSews,' whose editor was then eager to find a "picturesque and humorous" writer, and such, indeed, Lang was. He contributed to tho • Saturday ' and ' Pall Mall' and to many a periodical besides. He, wrote a multitude of books on a. wonderful variety of topics; ho made an income of £2.000 to £5.000 a year; ,-i.nd he was tho most modest writer of his day. Here wo are concerned with him solely as an anthropologist. His qualifications for writing on anthropological science- consisted in a vast_ acquaintance with tlio literature of tlio subject, original or independent ideas on several departments of it, and a style. of unequalled simplicity and lucidity. His defects were—a credulity surprising in so able a roan (his belief in crystal-gazing and possihly also in the divining rod are, examples), a lack of philosophical depth, equally surprising in one who had been trained in a. Scottish university, and a lovo of legends natural in a native, of Scott-land (Sir Walters country) who. liko all the, Langs, had probably gipsy blood in his veins. His services to anthropological science were chiefly two. He completed the discomfiture of the mythological school of Max Mueller and its explanation of myths and legends as the results of a disease, of language; and all who remember certain controversial articles m ' Mind ' and the ' Nineteenth Century' will not, have, forgotten the merciless character of the polemic. ANIMAL WORSHIP. Next he. successfully explained the origin and significance of animal worship as a phase of belief in all early peoples, and he, rightly denied that it was. as scholars like Do Rouge, Bnigsch, and Lo Pago Renouf contended, the. degradation of a higher-cult or a symbolical adoration of certain attributes or certain deities. AVherever it is found, as in tlie monstrous beast worship of Egypt, it is cognate with the same practices among Australian and American. lolynesian and African peoples; arid if {as in Egypt) it co-exists with higher cults, it is as a survival from a long-forgotten past. A proouct of the. Stone Ago. it lived 0 n into the age of metals. It belongs to the stage of totemism. when animals wero worshipped for their own sakos. It is therefore a heritage from tho state of savagery. The Hottentots, Iroquois, Australians, and Bushmen actually worship just such, though not tho same., animals as the. Egyptians did. More than this, the mylhes of the higher deities, such .as Osiris, closely resemble the mvfcbcs (the orthography is that of the illustrious Grote. and the word as so spelled is not synonymous with "myths") found among tho'South Africans and Red Indians. , GENESIS OF RELIGIONS.

Andrew Lang so conclusively proves the. origin of the higher religions' in the religions of primitive peoples that we. should expect .him to go a good deal further. Should ho not bo a disciple of the school of Tylor and Spencer, whose- views, independently arrived at. so strikingly resemble one another? But, no; when Lang comes to consider the genesis of religions he is found to be a- disbelicycr in the theories of Jylor and Spencer. He avows himself a rationalist in regard to the rationalism of his masters and teachers, as ho too modestly styles them, and he declares that he "deserves to bo an outcast from tlio church, anthropological of" Tylor, Huxley, Spencer, Sir Alfred Lyall, and Grant Allon. Yet ho had affirmed that the stories which form the tissue of tho higher religions "spring from n 0 pure religious source, but embedv the delusions and fantastic dreams of the lowest and least developed human fancy ana human speculation." t n i ar had Rot as lon C a £° *» 1886. in 1908 he had advanced to a different point of view. Between tho two dates ho had made the acquaintance of the vast literature that has sprung up around tho tribal usages of the Australian blacks. *rom a long series of writings by Howitt especially, Lang, elicited the result that the south-eastern blacks believed in an AllI'ather, or supreme deity, named Baiame in some quarters and Tunjil in others. As this being is anthropomorphicallv conceived, there is in him no trace of the divine, and ho is not envisaged as spiritual. Therefore ho can never have been an ancestral headman, and cannot now lie the idealised ghost ot a tribal notable. Ho made ail things and gave all commandments. But lie is not worskipped or sacrificed to. Acoord"W- ghost or ancestor-worship is not the base of Australian religion. Similar supreme deities are fcrmdamong the And.imanese, tho Masai, and the Fans Ancestor worship is. therefore, not the origin of universal religion. Lang has failed to grasp a law of religious development. After having plaved a lead-ing-part- in tho life of a people." a supreme god is often pushed into the. background, and his place is taken bv a younger and more robust deity. Just so "was Vishnu superseded by Indra. Krone* by Zeus, Saturn by Jupiter, and (as I hav'o myself shown in the 'Hibbcrt Journal-) Jehovah by Christ. This is tho lev to Baiame or Putljll. He is a superseded deity' pushed into the background, though still revered while his place lias lieen taken by another, who is the working deity. And m all probability he had his origin' in the deification of hea* man. medicine, man. or other tribal ancestor