134 Mr. Flower Reply to Professor Owen's [Mar. 30, 



March 30, 1865. 

 Major-General SABINE, President, in the Chair. 



The Bight Honourable Lord Justice Turner, and the Right Honourable 

 the Earl of Donoughmore were admitted into the Society. 



The following communications were read : 



I. Reply to Prof. Owen's Paper "On Zoological Names of Cha- 

 racteristic Parts and Homological Interpretations of their Modifi- 

 cations and Beginnings, especially in reference to Connecting 

 Fibres of the Brain," read before the Royal Society March 23, 

 1865. ^By W. H. FLOWER, F.R.S. Received March 28, 1865. 



As the above-cited paper consists mainly of complaints of omissions and 

 misrepresentations alleged to be contained in the abstract of my paper 

 " On the Commissures of the Cerebral Hemispheres of the Marsupialia 

 and Monotremata, as compared with those of the Placental Mammals " 

 (Proceedings of Royal Society, vol. xiv. p. 71), I trust that I may be 

 allowed a few words in reply. My first impression on hearing the paper 

 read was a feeling of extreme surprise. When it had become neces- 

 sary to give publicity to the results of observations which in some respects 

 differed from those recorded by Prof. Owen, I was most anxious, in 

 consequence of the natural respect which I felt for one who has 

 laboured so long and assiduously in the field of anatomical research, that 

 this should be done with the greatest possible deference to his opinions and 

 feelings, and with the smallest semblance of anything which could be con- 

 strued into an " attack." In this I believed that I had succeeded. That 

 Prof. Owen should have read my " Abstract " from a point of view so 

 different from what I had intended, is to me a source of great regret. 



In the brief space allowed for the abstracts of papers communicated to 

 the Royal Society, copious and detailed references to the writings of pre- 

 vious authors are necessarily out of place. Where it is usual only to give 

 an outline of the scientific facts advanced in the paper, it would be obviously 

 improper to follow out the labyrinths of bygone discussions on intricate 

 questions of priority, of definitions, interpretations, and such like matters. 

 Hence most of the citations to be found in my paper, not only from the 

 writings of Prof. Owen, but also from numerous other authors, are omitted 

 in the abstract. To Prof. Owen's complaints that I have not assigned to 

 him the merit of this or that particular discovery, my reply is that I did 

 this generally once for all in my statement that "at the outset a confirma- 

 tion is afforded of the important fact, first observed by Prof. Owen, that 

 the brains of animals of the orders Marsupialia and Monotremata present 

 certain special and peculiar characters, by which they may be at once dis- 



