io8 LIFE OF FLOWER 



spicuous. Of course such of these discoveries as are 

 valid, if they had not been made by him, would have 

 been made later on by somebody else, as they merely 

 required accurate dissection and observation. But this 

 may be said of every discovery of a like nature ; and 

 Flower is entitled to all credit for having worked out 

 the subject in the way he did. It may be added, that, 

 with our present knowledge of mammalian morphology, 

 a classification based on the characters of the brain is 

 manifestly based on a misconception from first to last ; 

 the degree of development and specialisation of that 

 organ being purely adaptive features, and therefore not 

 dependent upon structural relationships. Had Owen's 

 classification been maintained, it would have been 

 necessary to assign the primitive Carnivora and Ungulata 

 to a group quite apart from the one containing their 

 existing representatives. 



In the light of modern research, it cannot now 

 be held that the result of Flower's investigations 

 in this direction was to demonstrate the existence 

 of a corpus callosum to the brain in all the members 

 of the mammalian class. 



In another paper, dealing with the brain of the Javan 

 loris, published in the Transactions of the Zoological 

 Society, Flower made a further contribution to the 

 study of this part of the organism. Previous to the 

 appearance of the memoir on the marsupial and mono- 

 treme brain, Flower had published, in the Natural 

 History Review for 1864, one on the number of cer- 

 vical vertebrae in the Sirenia (manati and dugong). 

 Apart from several papers on whales and dolphins, 

 which, as already mentioned, are reserved for considera- 



