LECTURES ON PHRENOLOGY; BY GEORGE COMBE, Esq. INCLUDING ITS APPLICATION TO THE PRESENT AND PROSPECTIVE WITH NOTES, AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY, AND AN HISTORICAL SKETCH; BY ANDREW BOARDMAN, RECORDING SECRETARY OF THE PHRENOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF NEW YORK. "This is truth though at enmity with the philosophy of ages."-Gall. LONDON: EDINBURGH: MCLACHLAN & STEWART. 1839. 125392. Cape Cottage, Portland, Maine. 30th July, 1839. ANDREW BOARDMAN, ESQ. My dear Sir, I have read your reports of my Lectures on Phrenology, and beg to express my satisfaction with their essential correctness. You ask if I have any objection to your publishing the reports in a separate volume.-As the American publishers of my works, Messrs. Marsh, Capen, Lyon & Co. of Boston, have given their consent, you have my full concurrence in your doing Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1839, by SAMUEL COLMAN, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New-York. 152305° PREFACE. PHRENOLOGISTS, deeply regretting that opinions the most defamatory and erroneous were promulgated concerning the science of their con victions and affections, producing a prevalent belief that it is the effusion of a bewildered imagination, believed in only by the weak and enthusiastic, hailed the arrival of Mr. Combe with peculiar pleasure, confident that his labours would greatly tend to give currency to more correct views. But knowing the small proportion that his audiences, however numerous, would bear to the whole community; knowing too, the fleeting nature of unwritten words, 1 determined, in an humble way, to aid his efforts to diffuse a knowledge of that science to which he has devoted his future life. I accordingly offered to furnish the New-York Daily and New-York Weekly Whig with condensed reports of his lectures. These were accepted. published, and eagerly sought after. The publisher said that nothing issued in this city during last winter, "had taken so well." They were copied in part, by various papers throughout the Union, and entire by the Toronto Palladium. I commenced these reports without the faintest idea of ever deriving from them pecuniary advantage, or of ever publishing them collectively; but being urged to do so by several gentlemen, friendly to Phrenology, of high standing in the medical profession, I mentioned the proposition to Mr. Colman, who offered to form an arrangement with me for carrying it into effect. I wrote to Mr. Combe for permission, who generously gave to me his "hearty consent." Previously to concluding the foregoing arrangements, Mr. Combe had yielded to the solicitations of his New-York friends, that he would again lecture in this city. I determined, therefore, not to publish till having |
