“You will excuse, gentlemen, this unusual way of opening my performance; but as I have begun, so shall I finish it; only between the acts, permit me to say a few words which may interest some of you. You see a man before you whose brain is not his own, but—another’s.”
Then with his right hand my friend grasped the top of his head, and as easily as if he were taking off his cap, he took off the upper part of his skull, and holding it awhile in his hand, advanced a few steps to the foreground.
“Nearly all that I am going to tell you now will seem improbable,” he said, “but any of the savants present may convince himself of its truth. Allow me!”
Stepping down into the half-circle of guests, he seated himself on a chair and continued,—
“Let some one who knows anatomy and physiology examine my brain!”
At these words some of the guests at the professors’ table arose, surrounded my friend, and began to examine. One of them undertook an oral explanation.
“Truly, so it is! We really see the skull pared off and the surface of the brain. The surface shows quite normal convolutions. Under a microscope some of them might, perhaps, show some differences in size and form, but now we can only see a common surface. We see, plainly also the well-known gray matter, composed of nerve-cells and deposited all along the surface in small convolutions,—and, for the benefit of laymen, I add that modern physiologists designate this gray matter as the seat of consciousness, thought, talent, and recollections. More I do not pretend to say.”
“It will be my turn now,” my friend remarked, as he put the skull on his head, and slowly walked back to his desk.
“The brain which one of my esteemed guests has just examined,” said my friend, opening his preliminary explanations, “is not, as I have mentioned, my own, but another’s. I borrowed it for the same purpose for which millions of others have for ages been borrowing the most precious results of the activity of other people’s
