It is this unhappy and irresistible propensity which reduces me to despair, and makes me attempt my own life."-Sur l'Alienation Mentale, deuxième êdition, p. 102 et 103. sect. 117.

Individuals who occasionally commit murder, or set fire to property, without any rational motive, sometimes ascribe their actions to the temptation of the devil, asserting that the devil whispered into their ears, "kill him," "kill him," and never ceased to repeat the exhortation till they had complied with it. Diseased activity of this organ, filling the mind habitually with a desire to destroy, probably gives rise to this impression.

One form in which disease of this organ sometimes appears, requires particular notice; it is when it prompts females of the most unquestionable reputation to child-murder. I cite the following from the public newspapers of May, 1822. "On Sunday morning, about half-past ten o'clock, a most horrid murder of unparalleled inhumanity, was perpetrated on the body of a fine female infant, about eight months old, named Sarah Mountford, by her own mother, wife of Mr. Mountford, weaver, No. 1. Virginia Row, Bethnal Green. The husband, who is a Methodist, had gone to chapel, leaving his wife to clean, and send to the Sunday school, her young family. Having done this, it appeared she cleaned herself and her infant, when, overcome by some extraordinary aberration of intellect, she cut off the head of the child with a razor, and, besmeared with the blood, immediately told the persons in the house of the bloody deed, desiring to be given into custody, as she wanted to be hanged. From the conduct of the wretched woman after the transaction, no doubt can be entertained of her insanity. Mrs. Mountford underwent a short examination on Monday, and was committed for trial. A coroner's inquest has been held, which returned a verdict of wilful murder against the wretched woman. The distress of the family is extreme. The unhappy husband and two of the eldest daughters are seen running about the streets in a state of distraction. One of the latter has been deprived of utterance since the horrid transaction." This woman is said to have been "overcome by some extraordinary aberration of intellect;" which mode of expression may be for

given in the writer of a newspaper paragraph, although, viewed philosophically, it is absurd. The intellectual powers enumerated by the metaphysicians, such as Perception, Conception, Memory, Imagination, and Judgment, furnish no propensities to action, which, being deranged, could produce such a piece of barbarity. Derangement of intellect causes the patient to reason incorrectly, and speak incoherently; but if his feelings be sound, he is not mischievous. Here, however, the unhappy woman seems to have been inspired with a blind and irresistible impulse to kill, arising from disease of Destructiveness.

These details are exceedingly painful, and the reader may question the taste which permits their insertion; but great ignorance prevails in the public mind on this subject, and the records of our criminal courts still show cases of wretches condemned to the gallows, who, if Phrenology were known to the judges and juries, would be consigned to a lunatic asylum.

This organ is larger in the male head than in the female; and hence the male head is in general broader. The manifestations correspond for the propensity is less vigorously manifested by woman than by man.

As already noticed, the organ is common to man with carnivorous animals. Dr. Gall, however, remarks, "that the organ is not, in all carnivorous animals, situated with rigorous exactness above the external opening of the ear. Among some species of birds, for example, in the stork, the cormorant, the heron, the gull, &c., the external opening of the ear is considerably drawn back, and the organ of the propensity to kill is placed immediately behind the orbits, forming a large prominence upon each side, the size of which is found to bear an uniform proportion to the degree in which the animal manifests the propensity to kill. In comparing the crania of carnivorous birds with the skulls of those that can live indifferently either upon animals or vegetables, this prominence is found to be less conspicuous in the latter; in the duck, for example, and in the different species of thrushes; and it becomes less and less prominent in proportion as the birds exhibit a more distinct preference for vegetables, such as the swan, the goose," &c.

The differences are illustrated by plates in Dr. Gall's work. If the brain of a sheep and that of a dog be compared, a great deficiency will be discovered in the former at Destructiveness.

In 1827, Monsieur Vimont presented to the Royal Institute of France, a memoir on Comparative Phrenology, in which he brings forward a vast collection of most interesting facts, in regard to the dispositions and forms of the brain in the lower animals. In regard to Destructiveness, he says, "All animals which live on flesh, or which have a propensity for destroying, have a particular part of the cranium whose developement corresponds with that of this faculty. Thus all the fera, without exception, have the squamous portion of the temporal bone † enlarged in a perceptible manner. We may cite as examples, the tiger, the cat, the fox, the martin, the weasel, the ermine.

"In the carnivorous birds properly so called, the portion of the cranium situated behind the orbit, corresponds with the organ of carnivorous instinct, and presents a remarkable developement. In the omnivorous birds, the enlargement is a little more posterior." The organ is established.

ALIMENTIVENESS, OR ORGAN OF THE APPETITE For food.

Ir early occurred to Drs. Gall and Spurzheim, that the appetite for food is an instinct not referable to any of the recognised principles of mind, and they therefore were disposed to view it as a primitive power, having a separate organ; but they did not discover its situation.

In the sheep, the olfactory nerves, which are very large, are perceived to originate from two cerebral convolutions, lying at the base of the middle lobe of the brain, adjoining and immediately below the situation occupied by the organs of Destructiveness in carnivorous animals. The sheep is guided in the selection of its food by the sense of smell; and the inference suggests itself, that these parts may be the organs of the instinct which prompts it to *Beasts of prey. +Situated immediately outward of Destructiveness.

take nourishment. Corresponding convolutions occur in the human brain, but the functions of them are not ascertained, owing to their local situation presenting obstacles to the determination of their size during life. The conjecture, however, seemed to me plausible, that they might serve a similar purpose to that here supposed to belong to them in the sheep.

This subject has attracted the notice of that ingenious phrenologist Dr. Hoppe of Copenhagen, and he has treated of it in two valuable communications, published in the Phrenological Journal, Nos. V. and VII. He is of opinion, that, besides the nerves of the stomach and palate, an affection of which gives rise to the sensations of hunger and thirst, there must also be an organ in the brains of animals for the instinct of nutrition (taking nourishment for the preservation of life,) which incites them to the sensual enjoyments of the palate, and the activity of which is independent of hunger and thirst. "How," says he, "should the mere sense of hunger, more than any other disagreeable or painful sensation, make the animal desire food, the necessity of such not being known to him by experience? This could only be effected by instinct, because either an instinct, i. e. the immediate impulse of an organ, or else experience and reflection, are the causes of all actions.

"We observe, that the chicken is no sooner out of the egg, than it picks the grain that lies on the ground, and the new-born babe sucks the nipple. Is this to be explained without the supposition of an organ analogous to that which makes the duckling immediately plunge into the water, or makes the kitten bite the first mouse it meets with?

"Neither am I able otherwise to conceive how the new-born animal can discriminate what is useful for its nutrition; that, for instance, the chicken never mistakes gravel for grain, and that the wild beasts always avoid poisonous plants without ever tasting them.

"When the child, even enjoying perfect health, sucks till the stomach is filled, in a literal sense of the word, it surely feels no hunger or thirst; yet, if laid to the breast, it will continue sucking, even sometimes having thrown off the last draught from overfilling.

"If nothing but hunger and thirst impelled man to take food, he would, when satiated, have no appetite for meat and drink; yet we every day observe people that cannot resist the temptation of surfeiting themselves both with meat and drink, though they know it to be noxious, and others again that never are tempted to gluttony."

Dr. Hoppe adds several other reasons in support of an organ of nutrition, and sums up his views in the following words :"According to my opinion, hunger and thirst must be discriminated from the desire of food which we call appetite; for those I consider as only affections of the stomachical and palatic nerves, caused by deficiency of necessary supply; but appetite as an activity of a fundamental animal instinct, which has in the brain an organ analogous to the rest of the organs. Yet there is a very intimate connexion between these; thus, nothing can more effectually rouse appetite than hunger."

In lecturing on Phrenology, I had for some years pointed out the part of the brain above alluded to as the probable seat of this organ; and Dr. Hoppe, without being aware of this circumstance, or the reasons on which this conjecture was founded, arrived at a similar conclusion. He proceeded even so far as to point out an external indication of the size of the organ. "Regarding," says he, "the organ for taking nourishment, I have been led to think, since I wrote last, that the place where its different degrees of developement are manifested in the living body, is in the fossa zygomatica, exactly under the organ of Acquisitiveness, and before that of Destructiveness. Before I had thought at all of Phrenology, I was struck with the remarkable largeness of the face or head of a friend of mine, caused, not by prominent cheek-bones, as in some varieties of mankind, but more towards the ears, by the great convexity of the zygomatic arch. Knowing that this indi vidual was exceedingly fond of good living, and that, even in spite of a very powerful intellect, and propensities moderate in almost every other respect, he was prone to indulge too freely in the joys of the table, I afterwards thought that this form of the head, and tendency of the mind, might bear a nearer relation to each other