ROLLESTOX ON THE BRAIN OF THE ORANG TJTANG. 201 



" what are the fewest and simplest assumptions, which being granted, 

 the whole existing order of nature would result,"* so the aim of the 

 philosophic naturalist should be to determine how small a number of 

 primitive types may be reasonably supposed to have given origin, by the 

 ordinary course of "descent with modification, " to the vast multitude 

 of diversified forms that have peopled the globe in the long succession 

 of geological ages, and constitute its present Fauna and Flora. 



XX. — Ox the Affinities of the Brain of the Orang Utang. By 

 George Eolleston, IT. D., F. L. S., Linacre Professor of Anatomy. 



As an opportunity has quite lately been afforded me of dissecting an 

 Orang Utang, and as the University Museum possesses a considerable 

 number of preparations which illustrate "the Zoological Relations of 

 Man with the Lower Animals," it is less presumptuous in me than it 

 otherwise would have been, to write upon a subject which has met with 

 such able, as well as such recent, handling in the pages of this Journal. 

 The great attention which the Paper to which I allude has attracted, 

 renders it unnecessary for me either to recapitulate the views it pro- 

 pounds, or to specify in detail the points in which I agree, or those in 

 which I feel myself compelled to differ, with the writer of it, whose au- 

 thority I should be little likely needlessly to dispute. 



In this Paper it will be with Human rather than with Simious 

 Brains that I shall contrast and compare the Brain of the Orang Utang ; 

 incidentally, however, I shall institute comparisons between the Brain 

 of the Asiatic Ape, and that of the smaller of the two most anthropoid 

 African Apes, the Chimpanzee. 



Tiedemann and Buffon exemplify, respectively, the two most oppo- 

 site views which it is possible to entertain as to the questions of the 

 actual anatomical truth, on the one hand, and of the possible anthropo- 

 logical bearings of the former of these two comparisons, on the other. 

 Buffon, writing in 1766, speaks of the Brain of the Orang in much the 

 same language as Tyson, in his "Anatomy of a Pygmie," had more 

 than sixty years previously, applied to the Brain of the Chimpanzee. 

 Between these Brains and that of Man there was, according to these 

 writers, actually no difference at all — "Le Cerveauf est absolument de 

 la meme forme et de la meme proportion." And the doctrine of the 

 immateriality of the soul was, in the estimation of these authors, not 

 merely compatible with, but a corollary of, these not wholly correct 

 anatomical premises. Though the Brain in each is the same — in the 

 one the power of thought exists, in the other it is absent. Thought, 



* Mill's Lo^ic, 3rd ed., vol. i., p. 327. 

 f Histoire Xaturelle, torn xiv., p. 61. Paris, 1766. 

 VOL. I. N. H. JR. 2D 



