THE CEREBRAL FISSURES OF TWO PHILOSOPHERS, 



CHAUNCEY WRIGHT AND JAMES 



EDWARD OLIVER. ' 



By Burt G. Wilder. 



These men were recognized as superior in character and 

 mental power. They were mathematicians, and thought deeply 

 upon the broadest questions. Wright was more of a writer 

 and general critic ; Oliver was more of a teacher of advanced 

 mathematics. The latter was slight in frame and alert in action. 

 The former was large in person and slow of speech and 

 movement. 



Wright's brain weighed 15 i6 grams (53.50 oz.), Oliver's 

 14 1 6 (49.94). Although above the average of male brains 

 (about 1400= 49.4), greater weights are not uncommon, even 

 among less intellectual persons. In both, the frontal region is 

 unusually high and wide ; the unprecedented squareness of 

 Wright's suggests some post-niorteni pressure, of which, how- 

 ever, there is no record. In both, the supertemporal fissure is 

 larger than common. Oliver's fissures present several individ- 

 ual variations of the common type, but none comparable with 

 the two rare conditions in Wright's already noted by Dwight 

 (Amen Acad. Arts a7id Sciences, Proceedings, XIII., 210-215, 

 1877) and the writer [Jour. Ncrv. and Mental Disease, YJSW., 

 753-754; Amer. Neurol. Trans., 1890; "Ref. Handbook Med. 

 Sciences," VIII., 158-159, IX., 108). The complete interrup- 

 tion of the central fissure has been observed in a dozen or more 

 cases. The simplicity of the fissures, and the width and flat- 

 ness of the gyres are paralleled in the Cornell collection only 

 in the much smaller brain of an unknown mulatto (No. 322, 



'Abstract of a paper presented to the American Neurological Association, 

 June 7, 1895. 



