Münsterberg's Photoplays - continued...

One of the etchings in Nichols article shows models of the brain and various sense organs (eye, ear). A corresponding photo is not found in Münsterberg's catalog (although it lists these models) but has survived in the archives. This remarkable photography is much larger than the etching published by Nichols. It shows numerous wax and other models of human and animal brains as well as human and animal heads with the brain exposed to the side. It also displays a set of eight wax models showing the phylogenetic development of the brain after Robert Wiedersheim (1848-1923), clastic models of various sense organs (ears and eyes), and – as a kind of striking climax – a large flexible wire model of the human brain. Under the title "Phantom of fibres in the human brain and the spinal mellow," this model was produced by the Swiss optician Adam Ferdinand Buechi in Bern according to the original scheme of the fiber distribution in the brain published by physiologist Christoph Aeby in 1883.

Display of Wax Models, 1892 (Image: Harvard University Archive); overlay: Nichols, 1893
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In his short description of the dynamic device, Buechi wrote: "The phantom shows the natural form of the brain and a portion of the spinal marrow nearly six times enlarged. It is intended to exhibit the extremely complicated and difficultly traceable structure of the central nervous system according to the scientific views of the present day. The ganglia are represented by pieces of cork, their connecting fibres by wires and both are according to their relation arranged to groups by different coloring. Every body may in harmony with its wonts insert easily other currents or change the existing."

Ironically, it is this unpublished photograph that, in retrospect, perfectly illustrates Münsterberg's turn from the idealist Wundtian psychology to James's pragmatic and evolutionary science of mental life. Offering a comparative and at the same time hierarchically ordered view of the development of animal and human brains, it programmatically shows the comprehensive scope of experimental psychological science that Münsterberg was to establish when returning to Harvard on a permanent basis in 1897.