THE INTERPRETER 123 



dence adduced by Huxley, Flower, and othijr com- 

 parative anatomists in disproof of this, and if any 

 justification of Huxley's denial of Owen's contention 

 was needed, this will be found in Professor D. J. 

 Cunningham's address to the Anthropological section 

 of the British Association meeting of 1901. He 

 says : — 



To us, at the present time, it is difficult to con- 

 ceive how it was ever possible to doubt that the 

 occipital lobe was a distinctive character of the simian 

 brain as well as of the human brain, and yet at suc- 

 cessive meetings of the Association (i860, 1861, and 

 1862), a discussion, which was probably one of the 

 most heated in the course of its history, took place on 

 this very point. In the light of our present knowl- 

 edge we could fully understand Professor Huxley 

 closing the discussion by stating that the question had 

 " become one of personal veracity." Indeed, the 

 occipital lobe, so far from being absent, was developed 

 in the ape to a relatively greater extent than in man, 

 and this constituted one of the leading positive dis- 

 tinctive characters of the simian cerebrum. l 



The advance in degree of complexity of brain- 

 structure is traceable along the whole series of 

 animals. In the Invertebrates the brain is a mass 

 of nerve-ganglia near the head end of the body ; in 

 the lowest Vertebrate, the fish, it is very small, com- 

 pared with the spinal cord ; in reptiles its mass in- 

 creases ; and in birds it is still more marked. " The 



1 Times , Sept. 14, 1901. 



