486 STRUCTURE OF BRAIN. CHAP. xxiv. 



When the Dutch naturalists above mentioned found their 

 figures so often appealed to as authority, by one the weight of 

 whose opinion on such matters they well knew how to ap 

 preciate, they resolved to do their best towards preventing the 

 public from being misled. Accordingly, they addressed to 

 the Eoyal Academy of Amsterdam a memoir s On the brain 

 of an Orang-outang ' which had just died in the Zoological 

 Gardens of that city.* The dissection of this ape, in 1861, 

 fully bore out the general conclusions at which they had 

 previously arrived in 1849, as to the existence both in the 

 human and the simian brain of the three characters, which 

 Professor Owen had represented as exclusively appertaining 

 to Man, namely, the occipital or posterior lobe, the hippo 

 campus minor, and the posterior cornu. These last two 

 features consist of certain cavities and furrows in the posterior 

 lobes, which are caused by the foldings of the brain, and are 

 only visible when it is dissected. MM. Schroeder van der 

 Kolk and Vrolik took this opportunity of candidly confessing, 

 that M. Grratiolet's comments on the defects of their two 

 figures (figs. 54 and 55) were perfectly just, and they ex 

 pressed regret that Professor Owen should have overstated 

 the differences existing between the brain of Man and the 

 Quadrumana, 'led astray, as they supposed, by his zeal to 

 combat the Darwinian theory respecting the transformation 

 of species,' a doctrine against which they themselves pro 

 tested strongly, saying that it belongs to a class of specula 

 tions which are sure to be revived from time to time, and 

 are always 'peculiarly seductive to young and sanguine 

 minds.' f 



As the two memoirs before alluded to by us (p. 408), the 

 one by Mr. Darwin on ( Natural Selection,' and the other by 

 Mr. Wallace ' On the Tendency of Varieties to depart inde- 



* This paper is reprinted in the tory Eeview for January 1862, vol. ii. 

 original French, in the Natural His- p. 111. f Ibid. p. 114. 



