PERCEPTIONS OF ANIMALS. 57-5 



those faculties. The greater the power of com- 

 bming ideas, and of retaining them in the me- 

 mory, the greater do we find the developement 

 of the cerebral hemispheres. These parts of the 

 brain are comparatively small, as we have seen, 

 in fishes, reptiles, and the greater number of 

 birds ; but in the mammalia they are expanded 

 in a degree nearly proportional to the extent 

 of memory, sagacity, and docility. In man, in 

 whom all the faculties of sense and intellect are 

 so harmoniously combined, the brain is not only 

 the largest in its size, but beyond all comparison 

 the most complicated in its structure.* 



A large brain has been bestowed on man, evi- 

 dently with the design that he should exercise 

 superior powers of intellect; the great distin- 

 guishing features of which are the capacity for 

 retaining an immense variety of impressions, 

 and the strength, the extent, and vast range of 

 the associating principle, which combines them 

 into groups, and forms them into abstract ideas. 

 Yet the lower animals also possess their share of 

 memory, and of reason : they are capable of 

 acquiring knowledge from experience ; and, on 



* All the parts met with in the brain of animals exist also in 

 the brain of man ; while several of those found in man are either 

 extremely small, or altogether absent in the brains of the lower 

 animals. Soemmerring has enumerated no less than fifteen ma- 

 terial anatomical differences between the human brain and that 

 of the ape. 



