CEREBRAL STRUCTURE OF MAN AND THE APES. 133 



A SUCCINCT HISTORY OF THE CONTROVERSY RESPECTING. THE 

 CEREBRAL STRUCTURE OF MAN AND THE APES. 



Up to the year 1857 all anatomists of authority, who had occu- 

 pied themselves with the cerebral structure of the Apes — Cuvier, 

 Tiedemann, Sandifort, Vrolik, Isidore G. St. Hilaire, Schroeder van 

 der Kolk, Gratiolet — were agreed that the brain of the Ape possesses 



a POSTERIOR LOBE. 



Tiedemann, in 1825, figured and acknowledged in the text of 

 his ' Icones,' the existence of the posterior cornu of the lateral 

 ventricle in the Apes, not only under the title of ' Scrobiculus parvus 

 loco cornu posterioris' — a fact which has been paraded — but as 

 4 cornu posterius' (Icones, p. 54), a circumstance which has been, as 

 sedulously, kept in the back ground. 



Cuvier (Lecons, T. iii. p. 103) says, " the anterior or lateral ven- 

 tricles possess a digital cavity [posterior cornu] only in Man and the 

 Apes Its presence dej)ends on that of the poste- 

 rior lobes." 



Schroeder van der Kolk and Vrolik, and Gratiolet, had also fig- 

 ured and described the posterior cornu in various Apes. As to the 

 Hippocampus minor, Tiedemann had erroneously asserted its absence 

 in the Apes ; but Schroeder van der Kolk and Vrolik had pointed 

 out the existence of what they considered a rudimentary one in the 

 Chimpanzee, and Gratiolet had expressly affirmed its existence in 

 these animals. Such was the state of our information on these sub- 

 jects in the year 1856. 



In the year 1857, however, Professor Owen, either in ignorance of 

 these well-known facts or else unjustifiably suppressing them, sub- 

 mitted to the Linnsean Society a paper " On the Characters, Princi- 

 ples of Division, and Primary Groups of the Class Mammalia," which 

 was printed in the Society's Journal, and contains the following 

 passage : — " In Man ; the brain presents an ascensive step in develop- 

 ment, higher and more strongly marked than that by which the pre- 



