PROSPERINE

By Rossetti, 1828-1882.

D

ANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI was born in London, England, May 12, 1828. His mother was English and his father was an Italian professor and poet, who was made professor of the King's College, London, in 1831 and afterwards commentator on Dante.

After attending a private school for nine month (from the autumn of 1835-1836), he was sent to King's College School, where he remained until 1843. From a child he had shown a propensity for drawing and it was therefore assumed that his career should be an artistic one. And although he left school young he knew Latin, French, and Italian, and later he had some German lessons. He also had some Greek. On leaving school he went to Cary's Art Academy, and in 1846 obtained admission to the Royal Academy Antique School. In 1848 he exhibited his picture, The Girlhood of Mary, Virgin, and in the same year took an active part in forming the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, the members of which believed that artists should confront Nature herself-imitating no longer man's imitations of her--even though the imitations be the splendid works of those great masters which had hitherto been the inspiration of modern art. This made him very unpopular for a time. In 1851 he wrote the remarkable poem, Sister Helen. He wrote many poems before 1862 and had them announced for publication under the title of Dante at Verona, and other poems, but his wife died in this year from an overdose of laudanum taken for neuralgia, and Rossetti buried his manuscripts with her. Six years later he was persuaded to consent to their disinterment. They were published in 1870 and gave him a reputation second to no contemporary English poet after Tennyson and Browning. Much of the remainder of Rossetti's life may be summed up in a phrase, “chloral and its consequences." He first took this drug by the advice of a friend to relieve neuralgia and insomnia. Rossetti obtained equal celebrity as a poet and as a painter. It has been disputed in which class he stands higher.

In December, 1881, he went to Birchington, Kent, for his health, and died there Apr. 9, 1882.

PSYCHOLOGY

DESCRIPTIONS of the mind or soul begin with Plato and Aristotle. Locke may be called the father of psychology of modern times. The Germans tried to add exactness to psychology by an experimental method. Lotze in 1852, Fechner in 1860 and Wundt in 1863 all did much to bring this experimental point of view to a practical working basis. A great many facts have been discovered by laboratory methods and such investigations are still being pursued.

In 1861 Broca discovered that the brains of persons suffering one kind of aphasia showed a lesion in a certain spot.

About 1870 Hitzig showed that special movements could be excited in a dog by electrification of various parts of the brain. By this method and by comparing the injuries in the brains of persons suffering from nervous disorders, Ferrier and Munk, six or seven years later, established local centers for the senses of sight, hearing, touch, and smell. All of this introduced an entirely new conception of the relation of brain and mind. Briefly put, the facts are these: destroy a center in the brain and you destroy the corresponding sense or motion; destroy the path between two centers and the relation between corresponding ideas is destroyed; thus a patient may see his coat and not know what it is for. Moreover, not only does a lesion destroy the power of sight, for example, but takes away the memory of things seen. The question of localization is one of the most interesting in psychology, and has already. made possible surgical operations on the brain for diseases which previous ages did not connect with the brain at all.