XXXIV LIFE OF DK. KOLLESTON. 



refined Oxford culture was banished from his mind in dealing 

 with the nature of man.' 



The controversy here referred to, one of importance in modern 

 scientific history, lasted several years. It arose at the Oxford 

 meeting just mentioned out of a botanical paper by Dr. Daubeny 

 on the Sexuality of Plants, which went into criticism of Darwin's 

 'Origin of Species.' Professor Owen, in the discussion which 

 ensued, took up the question of differences between apes and 

 man, asserting that the brain of the Gorilla presented more 

 differences as compared with Man than with the lowest Quadru- 

 mana. This was met by Professor Huxley with a flat denial, he 

 declaring that the brains of man and the highest monkeys differ 

 less than the brains of the highest and lowest monkeys. Rolleston 

 does not appear to have spoken at this time, nor on the occasion 

 a day or two later when the Bishop of Oxford received a famous 

 rebuke for the rhetorical device of perverting the Darwinian 

 theory in order to make fun of it. But this problem of brain- 

 classification became an especial subject of Rolleston's study, and 

 in January 1862 he delivered a lecture upon it at the Royal 

 Institution, which is republished in the present volume. At the 

 Cambridge Meeting of the British Association in 1862, Professor 

 Owen renewed the contest, bringing it to a direct issue by reading 

 a paper ' On the Zoological Significance of the Brain and Limb 

 Characters of Man.' Appealing to his own system of classifica- 

 tion of the Mammalia by differences of brain structure, he 

 exhibited casts of the brains of gorilla and man, saying that 

 he had placed Man — owing to the prominence of the posterior 

 lobes of his brain, the existence of a posterior cornu in the 

 lateral ventricles, and the presence of a hippocampus minor in 

 the posterior cornu — in a distinct sub-kingdom, which he had 

 called Archencephala. He considered that the sudden advance 

 of the human brain, and the hiatus between that highest grade 

 of structure and the next step below attained by the orangs, 

 chimpanzees, and gorilla, was one of the most extraordinary in 

 the whole range of Comparative Anatomy, associated with Man's 

 intellectual capacity, his power of framing general propositions 



