BRAIN OF MAN AND THE BRAINS OP CERTAIN ANIMALS. 29 



brain marks off a claw-like ridge on the blunted lion-paw-like end 

 of the structure. There might be, there often are, several such 

 indentations, several such claw-like ridges, in the particular .brain 

 figured, as often in others there is but one. This is much the lan- 

 guage, by the way, which might be used of the hippocampus 

 minor, not as to its claws, but as to its entire mass : the cases are 

 parallel as to the literary history of the two structures also. For 

 Professor Tiedemann, writing in 1821, at Heidelberg 1 , said of 

 these claws that they were found in man, and in him only. ' Ho- 

 mini peculiares esse videntur.' { In cerebro Simiarum processus 

 digitatos non vidi.' They enjoyed, however, but for a short time 

 the pre-eminently important office of differentiating man from the 

 ape. After a short reign of but five years, they were ruthlessly 

 and for ever deposed from this exalted position by the same hand 

 that had placed them in it. Tiedemann's son-in-law, Professor 

 Fohmann, heard whilst at Leyden, in 1825, that among other 

 natural history treasures amassed in Java by two naturalists, and 

 sent home after their deaths in that deadly climate, there had 

 arrived the brain of an orang-utang. His representations pre- 

 vailed on Temminck and Sandifort to send this then all but unique 

 specimen to Heidelberg. They were liberally minded and enlight- 

 ened men, but his solicitations were, I suspect, somewhat urgent ; 

 I, at least, have not always found the managers of other museums 

 so complaisant. An account of the dissection of this brain ap- 

 peared shortly afterwards in the 'Zeitschrift fur Physiologie' (the 

 c Natural History Review' for 1826), edited at Darmstadt by Tiede- 

 mann and the two Trevirani, and on its twenty-fifth page I read as 

 follows : ' Each cornu ammonis (or hippocampus major) had its 

 medullary band (the taenia hippocampi), as in man, and showed 

 claw-like or knotty masses, which I had not observed upon the 

 cornu ammonis of other apes.' The turn of the third cornu had 

 not yet come, so Tiedemann goes on to say : ' The great lateral ven- 

 tricles consisted of three horns, an anterior, a middle or descending, 

 and a posterior horn.' Tiedemann, amongst other errors, had taught, 

 in 1 82 1, that the small size of the orang-utang's brain accounted 

 fully for the smallness of its faculties, as compared with man's, and 

 those of his disciples who had been adequately impressed with this 

 notion, and believed besides that ' peculiar mental powers were 



1 * Icones Cerebri Simiarum,' p. 90, Corollary xxi. 



