BEAIN OF MAN AND THE BEAINS OF CEKTAIN ANIMALS. 31 



and a-half ago differ ; but so far as the ventricles go, the figures 

 given in the current number of the 'Natural History Review 1 ' might 

 very easily be interchanged with that standing for human struc- 

 tures in the drawing of the anatomists, who had never dreamt of 

 contrasting these organs with those of the ape. And should any 

 one retaining any lurking kindness for the posterior cornu, come 

 thus warped, to decide which of the two figures was intended for 

 the simious, and which for the human brain, infallibly his judgment 

 would be wrong. For the figure of the human ventricle drawn 

 by the famous Eustachius, a name familiar to even the unlearned, 

 and edited by the almost equally famous Lancisi, has one of its 

 posterior cornua shortened and stunted and unsymmetrical, whereas 

 the posterior cornua in the drawing of our celebrated Dutch con- 

 temporaries are large and well-defined, exactly symmetrical cavities. 

 I cannot say whether the elder anatomists purposely drew these 

 cornua of unequal size ; certain it is that they very often are in 

 nature as Eustachius has drawn them in three of the figures in his 

 seventeenth plate ; his letter-press is silent upon the point, to 

 which, however, the brothers Wenzel spoke 2 unambiguously many 

 years later. 



The points wherein the human exterior surfaces and the simious 

 brains coincide and those in which they differ can be arranged 

 under two heads. Either they are such as the eye can judge of, 

 even though its owner be not an anatomist ex professo, depending 

 as they do upon outline and general configuration ; or they' are 

 such as a deeply-going analysis of the complexity of the convolutions 

 alone can elicit. For the power of describing this second class of 

 differences at all we are indebted to M. Gratiolet, and by means of 

 the lettered and numbered diagrams, which are taken from his 

 work, I shall hope to make these differences and resemblances 

 intelligible to you. To begin with the more easily intelligible class 

 of distinctions, those which are based on general outline and con- 

 figuration. Looking at a human and a simious cerebrum from 

 above, it is easy to see that both being ovoid, the ape's brain is 

 both more elegantly and more exactly egg-shaped. But elegance 

 and exactness are here, as often elsewhere, purchased at the cost of 

 strength and substance. The human ovoid is blunt because it is 



1 January, 1862, Plate IV. 



8 ' De Cerebro Hominis et Brutorum,' Tubingen, 181 2. 



