BY G. ELLIOT SMITH. 653 



charges of inaccuracy which have ))een ignorantly levelled against 

 him. I am well aware that the writer of the paper in question 

 had very bad material with which to work, but that is all the 

 more reason why he should have been more cautious in his attack 

 upon others' work. The hypercritical tone of the paper in question 

 reaches its acme in the following passages : — " On what ground, 

 too, does Owen maintain, that the essential function of the fornix 

 as a commissure ... is maintained, when, as will be shown 

 presently, all such fornix as exists in Ornithorhynchus decussates 

 in the middle line, is not united with the olfactory hidb and may 

 he, for all one can tell to the contrary, not a longitudinal commis- 

 sure at all, hut a series of tracts uniting together corresponding 

 parts of the two sides .?..." He saio the difficulty, but not 

 the way out of it."* 



The closing phrase in this quotation accurately describes the 

 position of its writer, who, by ignoring the close and intimate 

 connection of the hippocampus with the olfactory lobe (the 

 internal root, the Riechbv,ndel of Zuckerkandl, and "the olfactory 

 bundle of, the fascia dentata" of the present writer), and having 

 elsewhere stated that the external olfactory root cannot be traced 

 to the hippocampus, completely excludes tliQ hippocampus from 

 any connection with the olfactory region, in spite of the fact that 

 he correctly located the fascia dentata as the olfactory centre. 

 But for the statement of Owen that the "association" between the 

 olfactory and hippocampus is maintained to a greater extent (as 

 compared with the commissural connection) than in higher animals, 

 his statements may be taken as strictly accurate, a very close and 

 intimate association existing between the anterior extremity of 

 the hippocampus and the olfactory lobe, by means of fibres passing 

 through the precommissural area, and which are probably homo- 

 logous with some of the " precommissural fibres of Huxley " and 

 the striae Lancisii of the Eutherian cerebrum. The latter 

 homology is rendered all the more probable by the statements of 

 Blumenauf that the strife Lancisii, which are continued pos- 



* The italics are mine, 

 t Loc. cit. 



