18 
RECENT DISCOVERIES in connection with the 
PINEAL and PITUITARY BODIES of the BRAIN. 
By W. A. Herpman, D.Sc., F.L.S., 
PROFESSOR OF NATURAL HISTORY IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LIVERPOOL. 
With Plates I. and II. 
[Read 22nd January, 1887.] 
[A bstract.] 
THE interest which has long centred around those two 
mysterious organs connected with the thalamencephalon 
of the vertebrate brain—the epiphysis cerebri dorsally and 
the hypophysis cerebri ventrally—has lately been inten- 
sified by the researches of De Graaf, Spencer, and others 
on the pineal gland of the Lacertilia and other lower 
Vertebrata, and of Julin and others on the subneural 
gland of the Tunicata. In both cases the recent investi- 
gations tend to show that these bodies, as we now find 
them in higher Vertebrata (Pl. 1., fig. 1,e and h), are 
merely the useless rudiments of organs which were once 
of functional importance in lower forms. 
I.—THE PINEAL GLAND OR EPIPHYSIS CEREBRI. 
In a paper,* dated 19th January, 1886, and published 
on the 29th March of the same year, Von Henri W. de 
Graaf, of Leiden, gave a short account of the result of his 
investigations into the development of the epiphysis and 
of its structure in the adult of several species of Amphibia 
and Reptilia. He showed that this outgrowth from the 
* Zur Anatomie und Entwicklung der Epiphyse bei eee und 
Reptilien, Zoologischer Anzeiger, vol. ix., no. 219, p. 191. 
