I. 



ON THE AFFINITIES OF THE BRAIN OF 

 THE ORANG UTANG. 





As an opportunity has quite lately been afforded me of dissecting 

 an Orang Utang, and as the University Museum possesses a con- 

 siderable number of preparations which illustrate the ' Zoological 

 Relations of Man with the Lower Animals,' it is less presumptuous 

 in me than it otherwise would have been to write upon a subject 

 which has met with such able, as well as such recent handling in 

 the Natural History Review 1 . The great attention which the paper 

 to which I allude has attracted, renders it unnecessary for me either 

 to recapitulate the views it propounds, or to specify in detail the 

 points in which I agree, or those in which I feel myself compelled 

 to differ, with the writer of it, whose authority I should be little 

 likely needlessly to dispute. 



In this paper it will be with human rather than with simious 

 brains that I shall contrast and compare the brain of the Orang 

 Utang; incidentally, however, I shall institute comparisons between 

 the brain of the Asiatic ape, and that of the smaller of the two 

 most anthropoid African apes, the Chimpanzee. 



Tiedemann and Buffon exemplify, respectively, the two most 

 opposite views which it is possible to entertain as to the question 

 of the actual anatomical truth, on the one hand, and of the possible 

 anthropological bearings of the former of these two comparisons, on 

 the other. Buffon, writing in 1766, speaks of the brain of the 

 orang in much the same language as Tyson, in his 'Anatomy of 

 a Pygmie,' had, more than sixty years previously, applied to the 

 brain of the chimpanzee. Between these brains and that of man 



1 ' On the Zoological Relations of Man with the Lower Animals.' By Professor 

 Huxley, 1861. 



