Phrenology

The study of variations in the size, shape, and proportion of the cranium. Phrenology was a pseudoscience of the 18th and 19th centuries, based on the belief that a person's character could be learned by looking with care at the shape of the person's head and noting each and every bump and depression in the skull. The individual mental faculties were believed to be contained in neat compartments in the cerebral cortex, and the sizes of these faculties were supposed to be reflected by the configuration of the skull.