George Cruikshank (1792 - 1878) after a design by HTDB, Bumpology, 24 February 1826. Etching. Graphic Arts Cruikshank collection.
A mother has brought her son to the phrenologist John De Ville, in the Strand, who published Outlines of Phrenology as an accompaniment to the Phrenological Bust (1824) and A Manual of Phrenology (1826). His assistant makes the note: “Very large Wit N° 32.” Caption reads:
Pores o’er the Cranial Map with learned eyes
Each rising hill and bumpy knoll descries
Here secret fires, and there deep mines of sense
His touch detects beneath each prominence.
In De Ville’s manual, which appeared shortly before this print, Cruikshank probably read: “…For the immense number of facts collected proved that every head, except idiots, has the thirty-five organs; but we do not attempt to say they are all largely developed and active in one individual; but by observations on a few persons, every organ in one or the other will be found fully developed…except in very extraordinary cases.”
