Cerebral Localisation 1

Abstract

I. IT is rather more than ten years since the first edition of this book came under review in the pages of this journal. And it was intrusted to very able hands, for the reviewer was George Henry Lewes, himself an experimentalist in this branch of physiology, and of the highest distinction as a philosopher and psychologist. The review is courteously but unflinchingly hostile: exception is taken to some of the facts and to most of the deductions of the author; although the value of the work, from its richness in suggestions as well as in facts, is ungrudgingly admitted. Mr. Lewes especially complains that the book “is so deficient in the indispensable correctives of counter facts and arguments, that the reader must be cautioned against accepting any position unless elsewhere verified.... From one cause or another there is a disregard of counter evidence, which, in a second edition, I should seriously urge him to rectify..... This disregard arises from no unfairness, but simply from the one-sidedness which comes from preoccupation with certain views.”