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cultivated all the faculties which He has bestowed upon us, to their full extent and perfection, then indeed will come the Millennium-an issue towards which we are steadily and rapidly advancing.

"God never meant that man should scale the heavens
By strides of human wisdom."

Even should it be found that two or three persons have slightly indicated a slight guess at a slight portion of the theory I am attempting to establish, my ideas are not the less original, for no suggestion reached me till more than twenty years after I had completely arranged the whole in my own mind. The previous hints may diminish the merit, but not the value of my demonstration. If I can firmly fix the latter in the convictions of the public, it is all I desire to accomplish.-The originality may be denied without giving me the slightest pain.

He who just indicates or asserts that a certain block of marble contains a beautiful statue is not, however, placed exactly on the same level with the sculptor who clears away the rubbish and gives it form and expression. The simple fact of the vaccine disease being a preservative from small-pox was known a century before the birth of Dr. Jenner, but it was he who elaborated the proofs and established the practice. If my theory be proved beyond cavil, I may surely claim some portion of similar merit; for (if there be no defect in the mental telescope) it involves distant consequences of much greater importance than vaccination.

It is with theories as with wells" (says Swift), "you may see to the bottom of the deepest, if there be any water there, while another shall pass for

wondrous profound, when 'tis merely shallow, dark, and empty.”

The single point on which I am inclined to modify my assertions is the structure and office of the corpus callosum, respecting which, some new views have been opened to me by very recent dissection-they do not, however, in any respect interfere with the notions I have expressed as to the nature of the mind; and as the candidates for the college prize of the current year* will probably throw considerable light on this obscure subject, I do not, on the present occasion, put forth my own as yet crude and imperfect opinions.

I will only add, in anticipation and deprecation of critical censure, that a man cannot well be accused of precipitation or presumption who waits till his sixtieth year to promulgate opinions he has held during half his life with daily increasing conviction; which he believes to be of the greatest importance in medicine, morals, and jurisprudence-in the management of the insane-in the treatment of criminals-the education of youth-and, above all, in the discipline of imperfect, defective, and distorted minds.

ARTHUR LADBROKE WIGAN.

Croydon, November, 1844.

The distribution of the cerebral fibres.

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