Nick Maxwell While many Irishmen were transported to Tasmania, formerly Van Diemen’s Land, either as ordinary criminals or as political offenders during the first half of the nineteenth century, some Irishmen have chosen to settle there. One such was Edmund Dwyer Gray Jr, who rose to be premier of the state of Tasmania for a period of … Read more
The Gray family had strong connections with Australia. Sir John Gray’s brother, Wilson Gray, had emigrated to Australia in 1855; he was active there in the land reform movement and served as a member of the legislative assembly of Victoria. He was later district judge of the Otago goldfields in New Zealand. Moreover, Edmund Senior … Read more
The craniology collection in Trinity College, Dublin By Miguel DeArce and René Gapert The journal Nature recently published a colour map of the human brain (opposite page), identifying 100 brain regions with their distinctive functions. This brought to our mind other, older, nineteenth-century ‘phrenological heads’ that can be sourced from antiquarians throughout Europe (opposite page). … Read more
Craniology was another ‘science’ that dealt with the human skull, in this case an attempt to characterise different ethnic groups—human races—by measurements of their skulls, having previously defined fixed anatomical landmarks on its surface. While the American Civil War raged on the issue of slavery in the 1860s, some supporters of slavery in Britain—initially concentrated … Read more
Phrenology assumed that if someone had a tendency to act in a certain way, for instance admiring the landscape, the part of the brain building up the aesthetic experience would be well developed to support such over-activity, at the expense of a diminished development of some other area. This differential brain development would be reflected—they … Read more