280 Mr. R. Garner on the Conario- hypophysial 
XXVII.—On the Conario-hypophysial Cerebral Tract of 
Professor Owen. By Ropert GARNER, F.R.C.S., F.L.S. 
A REMARKABLE paper on this subject was read by the veteran 
anatomist above named at the meeting of the British Asso- 
ciation in 1881, and published in full in the Journal of the Lin- 
nean Society for January of this year, throwing light on those 
enigmatical parts of the brain, the hypophysis or pituitary 
gland, and the pineal gland, together with the intervening 
third ventricle. The Professor also draws other conclusions, 
to be alluded to further on in this paper. 
He alludes to Dr. Sapolini’s ideas respecting the glandular 
nature of the pituitary, which are, perhaps, but a version, 
further carried out, of views which have been held by many 
anatomists—that the parts in question are an essential to the 
secreting and serous system of the brain, indicated, in fact, by 
the old name of glands.. But passing by other notions which 
have been, or might be, held on this subject—that the bodies 
and region in question have some topographical relations to 
the formation of the cerebral convolutions (Foville and Cal- 
lender), that the so-called glands may indicate respectively the 
junction of the cerebral and spinal tracts, the pituitary being 
situated at the termination of the motor, and the pineal at the 
termination of the sensitive spinal tract, or that they act as 
sensitive nerves, indicative of the state of the brain or its 
bony case—the Professor enunciates his own theory, a deduc- 
tion from certain not unknown facts, but especially from 
others more modern of an embryological nature, which theory 
appears to us to be made out and quite his own. 
if we descend from fishes, as the skate, dogfish, or cod, to 
the cephalopodous mollusk, say the sepia, it will be evident 
that in the latter the nervous system is concentrated into what 
may be termed a brain (fig. 1, p. 284), corresponding, generally 
speaking, to the brain of the fish, but that it is threaded, as it 
were, by the cesophagus, this tube having a course which, in 
the fish, would be from the pituitary through the third ventricle 
and out at the pineal, or vice ver'sd. 
Passing over, as already observed, all supposed uses or 
functions of the parts composing this tract in the vertebrates, 
they are considered to be the altered homologues of the ceso- 
phagus and mouth, as seen in the sepia. The reasoning from 
which these conclusions were drawn are, as just said, founded 
on certain embryological facts—imprimis, that though the 
intestinal canal of the invertebrates answers, upon the whole, 
to that of the vertebrates, the anterior inlets of the two do not 
