11
The first was entitled Manual de Frenolojía, o sea Filosofía del entendimiento humano fundada sobre la fisiolojía del zélebro (Barcelona, 1843); Cubí was a philologist as well as a phrenologist, and his interest in phonetics is easily seen in the titles of his books. During this same year he published his Sistema completo de Frenolojía, which was revised and reissued in 1844 and 1846.
12
See Granjel, pp. 44-45.
13
Cubí was actually summoned before an ecclesiastical tribunal in Santiago de Compostela in 1847, accused by the theologian Antonio Severo Borrajo of propounding any number of heresies in his defense of phrenology: pelagianism, denial of original sin, materialism, fatalism, defense of Hobbes, etc. (see Granjel, p. 49 and Carnicer, pp. 189-206). In 1843, shortly after Cubí began his proselytizing, Balmes had written a series of articles in La Sociedad of Barcelona (the articles are dated 15 June, 6 July and 18 July) condemning phrenology and Cubí more or less on these grounds. Gall, the inventor of phrenology, had been challenged in his time for the same reasons.
14
Ramón de Mesonero Romanos, «El romanticismo y los románticos», in Escenas matritenses, selección y prólogo de Ramón Gómez de la Serna (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1964), p. 62.
15
Granjel, p. 53.
16
Carnicer, p. 466.
17
Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, Historia de los heterodoxos españoles, vol. 6, libro 8, capítulo 3, p. 346, in his Obras completas, ed, E. Sánchez Reyes, vol. 40 (Santander: CSIC, 1948).
18
Menéndez Pelayo, Heterodoxos, p. 347.
19
Phrenology subsisted on the conversational level for a surprisingly long time, and in widelyscattered locations. Professor Denah Lida remembers hearing of it as a concept that some people believed in during her youth in Salonika, while Professor Rodolfo Cardona recalls having his head measured when he entered elementary school in Costa Rica, well into the twentieth century.
20
Le père Goriot takes place in 1819. I do not know whether phrenology was actually taught in the medical schools of France at the time, but Bianchon says to Vautrin that he does not like Mlle Michonneau because «Moi, qui étudie le système de Gall, je lui trouve les bosses de Judas»; see Honoré de Bálzac, Le père Goriot (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 80. It is possible that Bianchon is simply studying phrenology on his own.