NOTE ON THE RESEMBLANCES AND DIFFERENCES IN THE STRUCTURE AND THE
DEVELOPMENT OF THE BRAIN IN MAN AND APES

BY

PROFESSOR T.H. HUXLEY, F.R.S.


[This essay is taken from 'The Descent of Man and Selection in
relation to Sex' by Charles Darwin where it appears at the end of
Chapter VII which is also the end of Part I. Footnotes are
numbered as they appear in 'The Descent of Man.']


The controversy respecting the nature and the extent of the
differences in the structure of the brain in man and the apes,
which arose some fifteen years ago, has not yet come to an end,
though the subject matter of the dispute is, at present, totally
different from what it was formerly. It was originally asserted
and re-asserted, with singular pertinacity, that the brain of all
the apes, even the highest, differs from that of man, in the
absence of such conspicuous structures as the posterior lobes of
the cerebral hemispheres, with the posterior cornu of the lateral
ventricle and the hippocampus minor, contained in those lobes,
which are so obvious in man.

But the truth that the three structures in question are as well
developed in apes' as in human brains, or even better; and that
it is characteristic of all the Primates (if we exclude the
Lemurs) to have these parts well developed, stands at present on