tirely as such; and that if the author of it was satisfied with his share of the wit, no feeling of uneasiness remained on the other side. The story got into the Caledonian Mercury at the time, so that the above misrepresentation must have proceeded on the faith that the real facts were by this time forgotten. For nearly six months past, the opponents of phrenology have been chuckling over this story, as a delightful specimen of the accuracy of our science; and we have been equally amused with the proof it affords of their own gullibility. A human skull is an object which it is possible to imitate; and if, in the instance in question, or in any other instance, the imitation had been perfect, a cast from the fac-simile would have been just as completely indicative of natural talents and dispositions as a cast from the original skull itself, supposing phrenology to have a foundation in nature. There was a lack, therefore, not only of wit but of judgment, in the very conception of the trick. If the imitation was complete, no difference could exist between a cast from a turnip, and a cast from the skull which it was made exactly to resemble; if it was imperfect, the author of the joke, by his very departure from nature, encountered an evident risk of his design being detected, and becoming, himself, the butt of the very ridicule which he meant to direct against the phrenologist. This has actually been the result. The imitation was execrably bad, and the cast smelt so strongly of turnip, that a cow could have discovered its origin. We do not mean to say, that the pot-house wits themselves would have been equally acute far otherwise; for there cannot be even the shadow of doubt, that, had a cast, taken from a turnip as it grew, without any attempt to make it resemble a human head, been submitted to them, granting to them the unusual advantage of perfect sobriety, they would not have discovered the trick.*

*We have reprinted the Turnip Story in the present volume of Selections, because even yet it is in some quarters kept up as a joke against the phrenologists. The medical gentleman by whom the trick was played off, lately told one of the conductors of the Journal, that he had subsequently become as fully convinced of the truth of phrenology as of his own existence, and was devoting considerable attention to the study of it.

14

PHRENOLOGICAL EXPLANATION OF THE VOCAL ILLUSIONS COMMONLY CALLED VENTRILOQUISM.*

IF Phrenology be true, the phenomena of the moral and intellectual nature of man, however hitherto perplexing, must be made plain before it. Indeed, many of its opponents already admit, that it affords at least a sufficient explanation of phenomena which have been given up in despair, by metaphysicians of all descriptions, as inexplicable, according to the formula in that behalf, in the present state of human knowledge. This sufficiency, however, supplies one of the Baconian requisites for the admissibility of a cause. The other, the existence, is still disputed; phrenologists say it is demonstrated, as will be plain to their antagonists when they condescend to do justice to the evidence.

The nature of the singular art called, or rather miscalled, Ventriloquism, has been variously viewed by philosophical writers, both of the present and of former times. The nearest approach to the truth was undoubtedly made by the French philosophers, who investigated the subject in the year 1770. The light of phrenology enables us now to confirm their views, so far as they go, and, as we humbly think, to complete the demonstration. A brief description and history of this extraordinary vocal illusion, while it is necessary to our present purpose, may not be unacceptable to our readers.

Those who possess the art have invariably the power of imitating with their voice the voices of other persons, the cries of animals, and even the sounds produced by the mo tion and impulse of inanimate matter. They are always perfect imitators of sounds of every variety and description; but their most mysterious power is that of deluding those they address into the persuasion that the sound comes from a point not only out of, but at a considerable distance from, the speaker's own person. The voice, in such cases, having always a certain stifled sound, as if it originated in the chest, and being often uttered with the mouth nearly By James Simpson. Vol. i. No. 3, p. 466.

*

shut, at least with very little or no movement of the lips, was long, in ignorance of its true nature, referred to the stomach or belly; whence its name. It is not by any means clear, however, that the deluded would have established the stomach and belly as the parts of speech, if the deluders had not themselves directed them thither; and this leads us to a brief statement of what is known historically of this art. It seems to have been much more prevalent in ancient times than we now find it. It was known to the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Jews, and the Greeks; and their's were just the climates where, great flexibility in the organs of speech being joined with the requisite mental powers, we should have expected it to prevail. Scripture makes many references to the magicians, the wizards, the charmers, and those that have familiar spirits; and the profound Selden saw reason to translate the Hebrew Ob, plural, Oboth (generally translated Python, or magician), by Demon or Spirit, which was believed to dwell in the belly, and speak within the possessed without their exercising their own organs of speech. Accordingly, the Septuagint translates Ob by the Greek word engastrimuthos, and the Vulgate by ventriloquus, both words signifying the same thing, namely, speaking with, or at least from, the belly. This was too valuable a deception not to be practised by the cunning deluders of the superstitious ancients, and it became so common as to form a kind of divination called gastromancy, where the diviner answered without appearing to move his lips, so that the listener believed he heard an aerial voice.

There has been much controversy, even among divines, as to the reality of the ghost of Samuel. Eustathius, Archbishop of Antioch in the fourth century, composed a treatise in Greek, to prove that the supposed evocation of Samuel was the deception of a demon, of which the witch of Endor was possessed. This is, in truth, a treatise on engastrimism, according to the notions then entertained of it; for the Archbishop has no idea that the art was not preternatural. It is by no means clear that Saul saw Samuel, the word perceived being more properly understood, as he takes his information from the woman with regard to what did appear, and is prostrate on the earth when Sa

muel speaks.* Now, ventriloquism in the woman has been supposed all that was required. The Septuagint calls her engastrimuthon; and Selden expressly says, that in the original, this woman spoke by means of Ob, or a demon, which word is, in other places of the Old Testament, translated ventriloquus. The opinion is common, that the Pythian responses were delivered by the same vocal illusions; and in the Vulgate, the Witch of Endor herself is said habere pythonem.

In the earlier ages of Christianity, the same art prevailed; and St Chrysostom and Ecumenius both make mention of diviners who were called Engastrimandri. There is no reason to believe that so imposing and profitable an engine to move a rude people was unknown to the necromancers and enchanters of the dark ages; but we have no account of an individual ventriloquist earlier than the sixteenth century, when one appeared in France of the name of Louis Brabant, valet de chambre of Francis First. This man practised his art solely for the purposes of swindling. It is related of him, that being denied the hand of a young woman of fortune and station much above his own, by her father, he renewed his addresses after the father's death, and when in the presence of the lady and her mother, imitated the deceased's voice, which seemed to come from the ceiling of the apartment; with cries and groans he imputed his aggravated tortures in purgatory to his refusal of his daughter to Louis Brabant, and conjured her, "if e'er she did her poor father love," to marry the said Louis forthwith; which, in suitable horror, consternation, and filial piety, she did. The swindling bridegroom succeeded, at the same time, in enriching himself, so as to meet his bride's fortune. He frightened a rich old usurer out of ten thousand crowns, by a well-timed intimation, en ventriloque, of what awaited him in purgatory, with a distinct exposition of the only method of averting the otherwise certain doom. This accomplished person, we may presume, did much business on a smaller scale, besides these two great coups du maitre.

A century after this period, probably in consequence of the appearance of another or other ventriloquists, the first modern attempts seem to have been made to write upon

* 1 Sam. xxviii. 7, 8.

the subject; and Allazzi, an Italian, in 1629, published a work entitled Leonis Allatii de Engastrimytho Syntagma. Allazzi, in the same work, translated the Greek treatise of Eustathius into Latin; but his own treatise, as well as that of the Archbishop, is confined to the question of the evocation of the ghost of Samuel, on which controversy the works are erudite and argumentative.

Conrad Amman, a Dutch doctor in medicine, had observed the ventriloquists of the beginning of the last century, and published a Latin treatise at Amsterdam in 1700, to explode the old notion, current, it would appear, till then, that Engastrimism is a demon in the belly. His observations seem to have been made chiefly on an old woman at Amsterdam, who possessed the talent of ventriloquism. His theory was, that the effect was produced by a sort of swallowing of the words, or forcing them to retrograde as it. were by the trachea ;-by speaking during inspiration of the breath, and not, as in ordinary speech, during expiration." Quidquid hactenus," says Conrad Amman, “de voce et loquela dixi, de. quotidiana illa et vulgari accipi velim, quæ fit expirando; est enim adhuc modus eam per inspirationem formandi, qui non cuivis datus est, et quam aliquoties in Gastrimythis quibusdam admiratus sum: et Amstæledami olim vetulam quandam audivi utroque modo loquentem, sibique ad quæsita quasi inspirando respondentem; ut eam cum viro, duos ad minimum passus ab ea remoto, colloqui dejerassem; vocem enim, inter inspirandum absorptam e longinquo venire credebam. Muliercula hæc Pythiam agere facile potuisset," &c.

Nothing farther appears on the nature or history of ventriloquism till the year 1772, when a work was published on the subject by M. de la Chapelle, Censeur Royal at Paris, and a member of several learned bodies, besides the Royal Society of London. This, although a greatly over-learned work, with a prodigious display of irrelevant erudition, gives a most satisfactory explanation of ventriloquism, which was confirmed by a committee of the Academy of Sciences at Paris, and ultimately by the whole Academy. We have the more confidence in the theory, that it is demonstrated to be true, so far as it goes, by what we hold to be the surest of all tests by phrenology. The existing ventriloquists of M. de la Chapelle's time were two, a Baron Mengen, in

B