Lectures and Essays by Thomas Henry Huxley
page 347 of 524 (66%)
page 347 of 524 (66%)
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the Apes...its presence depends on that of the posterior lobes."
Schroeder van der Kolk and Vrolik, and Gratiolet, had also figured and described the posterior cornu in various Apes. As to the HIPPOCAMPUS MINOR Tiedemann had erroneously asserted its absence in the Apes; but Schroeder van der Kolk and Vrolik had pointed out the existence of what they considered a rudimentary one in the Chimpanzee, and Gratiolet had expressly affirmed its existence in these animals. Such was the state of our information on these subjects in the year 1856. In the year 1857, however, Professor Owen, either in ignorance of these well-known facts or else unjustifiably suppressing them, submitted to the Linnaean Society a paper "On the Characters, Principles of Division, and Primary Groups of the Class Mammalia," which was printed in the Society's Journal, and contains the following passage:--"In Man, the brain presents an ascensive step in development, higher and more strongly marked than that by which the preceding sub-class was distinguished from the one below it. Not only do the cerebral hemispheres overlap and the olfactory lobes and cerebellum, but they extend in advance of the one and further back than the other. The posterior development is so marked, that anatomists have assigned to that part the character of a third lobe; 'it is peculiar to the genus Homo, and equally peculiar is the posterior horn of the lateral ventricle and the 'hippocampus minor,' which characterise the hind lobe of each hemisphere'."--'Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnaean Society, Vol. ii. p. 19. As the essay in which this passage stands had no less ambitious an aim than the remodelling of the classification of the Mammalia, its author might be supposed to have written under a sense of peculiar |
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