Phrenology bust. Phrenology was a popular pseudoscience of the nineteenth century. The basis for the theory lay in a misplaced belief that a person's character and mental faculties effected the shape of their head. It was thought that this was because the skull became modified over the different functional areas of the cortex of the brain. Practitioners of the technique claimed that they could 'read' a person, that is assess their personality, by feeling the bumps on their head. In this bust, a wide range of personality traits are mapped across the various bones that comprise the skull. Bust by L.N. Fowler.