XXX 



British collections. The fruits of these labours he presented to the 

 Royal Society, of which he had a few years before been elected a Fo- 

 reign Member, in a memoir entitled " On the Brain of the Negro, 

 compared with that of the European and the Orang Outang," which 

 was published in the ' Philosophical Transactions' for 1836, and ap- 

 peared afterwards in German as a separate work in 1837. From his 

 extensive researches, Tiedemann arrived at the conclusion that, whilst 

 in the majority of cases the Negro's brain is undoubtedly less than 

 that of the European, there are nevertheless individuals of the negro 

 race in whom the brain is as large as in the Caucasian ; and coupling 

 this result with the fact, shown as he conceived by careful historical 

 and literary inquiries, that there is no province of intellectual activity 

 in which individuals of pure negro race have not distinguished them- 

 selves, he draws the inference that there is no impassable limit be- 

 tween Caucasian and Negro which should unconditionally denote the 

 one as the master of the other. 



In 1816 Tiedemann accepted a call to Heidelberg, where he under- 

 took the Professorship of Physiology, as well as that of Anatomy. 

 His physiology was, like Bailer's, founded on anatomy, observation, 

 and experiment. It is true that, while a student at Wurzburg, he was 

 for a time an ardent hearer of Schelling, in the hope of a new illu- 

 mination of biological science through the German " Naturphilo- 

 sophie ; " but his solid sense and the positive scientific progress he 

 had already made soon led him to distrust the allurements of a vain 

 system. It was in this practical spirit that, at a riper age, he joined 

 with the accomplished chemist Leopold Gmelin in those elaborate 

 researches which ended in the celebrated experimental Essay on Di- 

 gestion (Die Verdauung, nach Versuchen, 1825), in which the names 

 of the anatomist and chemist are so honourably associated. Tiedemann 

 also entered on the laborious task of preparing a systematic work 

 on physiology on an extended plan, somewhat after the manner of 

 the ' Elementa ' of Haller ; and the first volume, embracing general 

 physiology, was published in 1830. The issue of the third volume 

 was prematurely forced upon him by the unauthorized publication of 

 the corresponding part of his lectures ; but the work was not further 

 proceeded with, and the part published, although full of learning, 

 and displaying other excellencies characteristic of the author, and 

 although it was translated both into French and into English, at- 



