Cranioscopy

In the first part of my Atlas on Cranioscopy, which appeared in Leipzig in 1843, I remarked that in the skull of a Greenlander, which I sketched, it was singular, that on this skull there was a decided separation between the upper jaw-bone and the intermaxillary bone, almost as in little children or in quadrupeds.

A theory that was totally wrong helped focus attention on the right questions. Some people called it phrenology. Its founder, Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) called it cranioscopy. . . . It held that the brain had specific areas of function and that mental and moral attributes of a person could be determined by examination of the cranium.