448 PROFESSOR G. ELLIOT SMITH. 



to object) 1 to such an abuse of the word "pallium," I would 

 remind him that he should with equal vigour, if he be logical, 

 oppose the exclusion of the pyriform lobe (which is a true 

 " mantle," vide fig. 5) from the " pallium." 



But the most potent reason that can be advanced for thus 

 separating the hippocampus and the pyriform lobe from the 

 neopallium is not so much tlie constitution of a logically correct 

 " rhinencephalon " (if we be permitted the use of this much- 

 abused term in such a sense), but rather that such a procedure 

 gives due recognition and a distinguishing name to a morpho- 

 logically well-defined cortical area, which is the most important 

 feature of the whole brain, or, for that matter, of the whole body 

 in the higher Eutheria. Hitherto the strange irony of a confused 

 morphology has denied a name out of the plethora of cerebral 

 nomenclature to be the exclusive property of this the dominant 

 or^an of the nervous system, and the master-structure of the 

 whole body; for it has been linked with the hippocampus, 

 which does not share these high attributes, but has long since 

 reached the height of its importance, and is now on the wane 

 in those mammals in which the neopallium reaches its supreme 

 development. A distinctive name — corpus callosum — is now very 

 generally admitted for the commissural fibres of this neopallium, 

 in contradistinction to those of the hippocampus— psalterium. 

 Why, then, should not a like distinction be conferred on the 

 cortical areas from which the commissures ultimately spring ? 



When we come to consider an appropriate name for this 

 culminating feature of the mammalian brain, we are faced by 

 many difficulties. On the one hand, anatomists are very chary 

 of accepting an entirely new term for a well-known structure ; 

 and on the other hand, it is confusin- to use an old term in a 

 new sense. For there is no term in the whole range of anatom- 

 ical literature which has been applied to just that part of the 

 cerebral hemisphere which is responsible for the greatness of 

 the mammalian brain, and overshadows in its greatness and 

 usurps many of the functions of all the other regions of the 

 nervous system. In these notes I have spoken of this body as 

 the " neopallium," and in a series of memoirs on cerebral mor- 

 phology I have been accustomed since 1804 to speak of it as 



^ C. L. Henick, Jour. Comp. Neurology, 1896, p. xvii. 



