ON THE BEAINS OF TWO IDIOTS OF EUEOPEAN DESCENT. 
519 
convolutions, which are smaller in the Bnshwoman. It is possible, however, that some 
of the apparent simplicity of the Hottentot-Venus brain may be due to the unavoidable 
loss of form and detail incidental to its long period of preservation, as compared with 
the more recent and comparatively uninjured Bushwoman’s brain. This may account, 
for example, for the comparative breadth and smoothness of the upper frontal and of 
the middle and lower temporal convolutions in the figures of M. Gratiolet. Allowance 
being made for this, the resemblance between the convolutions of the two brains is very 
close, and serves to confirm the demonstration by that author of the relative simplicity 
of the Hottentot-Venus brain — a simplicity which he has only seen partially paralleled 
in normal European brains, but which, in my own more limited experience, I have 
never even seen approached in healthy brains. 
4. Whilst, then, the difference between the Bushwoman’s brain and the European 
brain, not merely as to size, but as to convolutional development, is very marked, that 
between the Bushwoman and the Hottentot Venus is very small ; and indeed if we regard 
the relative general development of the convolutions as a gauge of proximity or separa- 
tion, it is turned into a near resemblance ; and since no suspicion either of idiocy or other 
defect exists as concerns the Bushwoman, this would go far towards proving that the 
inferiority in the cerebrum of the Hottentot Venus is not due, as has been suggested, to 
an arrest of development of a personal or individual kind, but that, whilst undoubtedly 
both brains show an infantile or foetal leaning, this is to be attributed partly perhaps to 
sex, but in the main to the characterization of the race itself. 
5. As regards the question of the symmetry of the convolutions, it may be said that, 
although it is certainly easier to compare those of the two hemispheres in the simpler 
brains of the Bushwoman and Hottentot Venus than in the more highly developed 
European brain, still a very cursory examination shows that in numerous particular 
points, already mentioned in our description, there is just as frequent an occurrence of 
asymmetry in the two former as in the latter, by which circumstance therefore they 
manifest a truly human character. 
6. Although not only in size, but in every one of the signs of comparative inferiority 
manifested in the lower convolutional development of the Bushwoman’s cerebrum, it 
leans as it were to the higher quadrumanous forms, yet, as regards the sum of its con- 
volutional characters, judged of by the presence or absence, the individual and relative 
size and position, the comparative complexity or simplicity, and the symmetry or asym- 
metry of particular fissures and convolutions, there is a greater difference between it and 
the highest Ape’s brain yet described, viz. the adult Orang’s brain, than between jt and 
the European brain (compare Plates XX. & XXIII. figs. 7, 9, & 20). This difference 
is, as one evidently would expect, especially marked in the regions peculiarly deve- 
loped in Man, viz. in the anterior outer and upper parts of the frontal lobe, in the pro- 
minent part of the parietal lobe (that is, in the characteristically human supramarginal 
lobule), and in the regions of the external connecting convolutions, especially of the 
two upper external ones. It is almost needless to add that there is far less difference, 
3 z 2 
