Franz Joseph Gall

In the seventeenth century, Rene Descartes had assigned the quality of free will and the human soul to the pineal gland.

And in the late eighteenth century, a young student named Franz Joseph Gall had observed that the best memorizers in his class had the most prominent eyes and decided that this was due to higher development in the adjacent part of the brain.

As a physician, Gall went on to establish the study of phrenology, which held that strong mental faculties corresponded to highly developed brain regions observable as bumps in the skull.

The widespread popularity of phrenology throughout the early nineteenth century tipped the scales toward Aubertin's localism.

Yeah.

Uh, so phrenology, uh, is developed by France, Franz Joseph Gall in the early 18-- the Gall- The Gall of this man ... with which we treat his theories now.

[laughs] Yeah.

As we've said many times, this is about bumps and hollows on the skull.