see that no harm was done. Broca, says M. E. W. Brabrock, of the Anthropological Institute, "liked to tell an amusing anecdote on the subject of this supervision: The police officer acquitted himself of his mission with so great regularity, and had got so much the habit of sitting among the members, that he seemed soon to have forgotten that he was there in a special capacity. Wishing one day to be able to take a holiday with a clear conscience, he approached the officers with an amiable smile, and addressed Broca: 'There will be nothing interesting to-day, I suppose? May I go?' 'No, no, my friend,' Broca immediately replied,' you must not go for a walk; sit down and earn your pay.' He returned to his place very unwillingly, and never after ventured to ask a holiday from those he was set to look after."
The society held its first meeting May 19, 1859. When it was seen at work, adhesions came fast; and after it had published the first volume of its "Bulletins," and shown the exclusively scientific character of its labors, the suspicions which it had excited before its birth began to subside. The Minister of Public Instruction deigned at last to authorize it in 1861, and three years afterward it was recognized as a society of public utility. M. Broca, all agree, was the soul of this society. Having founded it, he kept it alive during its perilous early years by the prepondering interest of his incessant labors, and the communicative ardor of his devotion to the young science. He had the faculty of grouping the most diverse, and, apparently, the most discordant, elements around his person; the power to excite the zeal of some, restrain the passion of others, and to exercise over all an authority that was incontestable and uncontested, simply because it rested solely upon his real superiority freely recognized by all. This influence of Broca, visible particularly at the beginning, continued no less real till the last days of his life, notwithstanding he took pains to avoid everything that might give him the appearance of a personal direction. He was secretary of the society for the first three years, and was accustomed to record its debates from memory after the meetings were over, in a manner that heightened their original interest and gave prominence to the central point of the debate. In 1863 the growth of the society had made the office of a general secretary necessary. Broca was elected to the position, and held it till his death.
In 1861 Broca began his admirable researches on the brain. In a series of four memoirs he gave reasons for the belief that the brain was not, as many at the time thought, "an undivided organ in which the different faculties have no determined seat," but that the fundamental convolutions of the cerebral hemispheres are distinct organs, each having distinct functions. Performing an autopsy upon a man who had been deprived of the faculty of speech for twenty years, he was led, by a careful examination of the condition of his brain, to the conviction that the primary seat of his affection was in the third con-
