A Treatise on Headachs (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1835 edition. Excerpt: ... what man, as an isolated being, could evince, were he to try to execute any thing so geometrically perfect. Thus naturally led to the reflection, let us now observe the contradiction which such a train of ideas involves. It is an accorded fact, that the insect tribe are infinitely below the humblest of the vertebrated animals in relation to the size of the brain; and yet, if their instincts are acts of this organ, how comes it that many of them should be so superior in this respect to most of the vertebrated animals? Comparative anatomy solves the question--they are acts which the brain does not execute. From the foregoing observations, therefore, we are enabled to infer, that man ranks in the lowest grade as an instinctive being, because he is the most inferior of all relatively to the proportional volume of the fifth pair of nerves compared with the brain. The bee, again, may be placed at the head of the invertebrated animals for its instinctive faculties, because its cranial ganglions are the most developed. If it were necessary to adduce proof of the exceeding value of physiological knowledge, in elucidating what hitherto has afforded to the materialist and sceptic a tenable position for argumentation, founded on the mental manifestations of the brute creation, and what has no less evaded the researches and speculations of the profoundest metaphysicians satisfactorily to explain, --no more cogent or conclusive example could be given, than the manner in which the investigations of comparative anatomy have demonstrated the difference of the organs of instinct and of mind. ON HEADACHS. Headach, though a term so generally understood as to require no definition, is yet more complex in its signification than may at first sight appear. This..