What ’s your personality like ? Long before BuzzFeed or the Myers - Briggs personality test , there was phrenology — a pseudoscience that used the swelling and bumps of human skulls to tease out the secret of human psychological science .
This skeleton - bedeck snuff box looks creepy , but it dish as a ready to hand reference book for its 19th - century possessor . Part of the assembling of theScience Museum , London , it shows three views of a numbered skull on the palpebra and has a handy - cracking key on the bottom of the box seat .
The concept behindphrenologymakes a certain variety of sense : Since the Einstein holds the brain , different staff of the mind must live in sure parts of the mind , or so phrenology ’s followers think . And while that ’s not totally off base , they also believed that one could “ read ” the elevation and depression of the skull for cue about the capableness and “ mental faculty ” of the brainiac within .
That ’s demonstrated on this snuff box seat , which demonstrate three sentiment of a skull stud with numbers . Each number on the skull tally to an “ electronic organ ” responsible for a personality trait . telephone number 18 , for lesson , signal conceit , so someone with a large or protruding area at that part of the skull would presumably be vain .
There are 27 “ faculties ” or “ electronic organ ” overall , each divvied up and appoint by Franz Joseph Gall , the German physiologist who invented phrenology . The sectionscover the entire gamut of human emotion and behavior , from hauteur and arrogance to poetical natural endowment .
Phrenology may have long since been dismissed as a pseudoscience , but it sure enough left some creepy memorabilia behind . Take the box in question : Made in France at some point between 1800 and 1830 , it also jump on another style — sniffing snuff , or fine - ground tobacco . The practice was all the fury in Europe between the 16th and nineteenth centuries , and spawned not onlyelaborate sniff - taking ritualsbut a collecting craze . Today , snuff boxes made of everything from atomic number 47 to papier - mâché are stillprized collector ’s items .
Though snuff has fall out of favor , it ’s not bushed : you may still corrupt it in some places , andin the British House of Commons , where smoking is shun , some MPs still take a snort of snuff from the Parliament ’s communal box before legislating . Their box seat is n’t as creepy - nerveless , though … just plated with saturated silver . ( There are snuff boxesin the U.S. Senate , too , but though they ’re filled with sniff they ’re not used by any Senators today . )
[ h / tLindsey Fitzharris ]
