HKB
left uncovered is greater than in the lemurs, the lowest type of Primates, and almost as large as in the rodentia, or some of the lowest grades of the mammalia.
(* Huxley, "Natural History Review" January 7, 1861 page 76.)
(** "Annals and Magazine of Natural History" volume 7 1861 page 456 and Plate 20.)
When the Dutch naturalists above mentioned found their figures so often appealed to as authority, by one the weight of whose opinion on such matters they well knew how to appreciate, they resolved to do their best towards preventing the public from being misled. Accordingly, they addressed to the Royal Academy of Amsterdam a memoir "On the brain of an Orang-outang" which had just died in the Zoological Gardens of that city.*
(* This paper is reprinted in the original French in the "Natural History Review" volume 2 1862 page 111.)
The dissection of this ape, in 1861, fully bore out the general conclusions at which they had previously arrived in 1849, as to the existence both in the human and the simian brain of the three characters, which Professor Owen had represented as exclusively appertaining to Man, namely, the occipital or posterior lobe, the hippocampus minor, and the posterior cornu. These last two features consist of certain cavities and furrows in the posterior lobes, which are caused by the foldings of the brain, and are only visible when it is dissected. MM. Schroeder van der Kolk and Vrolik took this opportunity of candidly confessing that M. Gratiolet's comments on the defects of their two figures (Figures 54 and 55) were perfectly just, and they expressed regret that Professor Owen should have overstated the differences existing between the brain of Man and the Quadrumana, "led astray, as they supposed, by his zeal to combat the Darwinian theory respecting the transformation of species," a doctrine against which they themselves protested strongly, saying that it belongs to a class of speculations which are sure to be revived from time to time, and are always "peculiarly seductive to young and sanguine minds."*
(* Ibid. page 114.)
As the two memoirs before alluded to by us, the one by Mr. Darwin on "Natural Selection," and the other by Mr. Wallace "On the Tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the original Type," did not appear till 1858, a year after Professor Owen's classification of the mammalia, and as Darwin's "Origin of Species" was not published till another year had elapsed, we cannot accept the explanation above offered to us of the causes which led the founder of the sub-class Archencephala to seek for new points of distinction between the human and simian brains; but the Dutch anatomists may have fallen into this anachronism by having just read, in the paper by Professor Owen in the "Annals," some prefatory allusions to "the Vestiges of Creation," "Natural Selection, and the question whether man be or be not a descendant of the ape."
The number of original and important memoirs to which this discussion on the cerebral relations of Man to the Primates has already given rise in less than five years, must render the controversy for ever memorable in the history of Comparative Anatomy.*
(* Rolleston, "Natural History Review" April 1861. Huxley, on "Brain of Ateles" "Proceedings of the Zoological Society" 1861. Flower, "Posterior Lobe in Quadrumana" etc., "Philosophical Transactions" 1862. Id. "Javan Loris" "Proceedings of the Zoological Society" 1862. Id. on "Anatomy of Pithecia" ibid. 1862.)
In England alone, no less than fifteen genera of the Primates (the subjects having been almost all furnished by that admirable institution the Zoological Gardens of London) have been anatomically examined, and they include nearly all the leading types of structure of the Old and New World apes and monkeys, from the most anthropoid form to that farthest removed from Man; in other words, from the Chimpanzee to the Lemur. These are:--
Troglodytes (Chimpanzee). Pithecus (Orang). Hylobates (Gibbon).
Semnopithecus. Cercopithecus. Macacus. Cynocephalus (Baboon). Ateles (Spider Monkey).
Cebus (Capuchin Monkey). Pithecia (Saki). Nyctipithecus (Douricouli).