responsibility, and to have tested, with especial care, the statements
he ventured to promulgate. And even if this be expecting too much,
hastiness, or want of opportunity for due deliberation, cannot now be
pleaded in extenuation of any shortcomings; for the propositions cited
were repeated two years afterwards in the Reade Lecture, delivered
before so grave a body as the University of Cambridge, in 1859.

When the assertions, which I have italicised in the above extract, first
came under my notice, I was not a little astonished at so flat a
contradiction of the doctrines current among well-indormed anatomists;
but, not unnaturally imagining that the deliberate statements of a
responsible person must have some foundation in fact, I deemed it my
duty to investigate the subject anew before the time at which it would
be my business to lecture thereupon came round. The result of my
inquiries was to prove that Mr. Owen's three assertions, that "the third
lobe, the posterior horn of the lateral ventricle, and the hippocampus
minor," are "peculiar to the genus 'Homo'," are contrary to the plainest
facts. I communicated this conclusion to the students of my class; and
then, having no desire to embark in a controversy which could not
redound to the honour of British science, whatever its issue, I turned
to more congenial occupations.

The time speedily arrived, however, when a persistence in this reticence
would have involved me in an unworthy paltering with truth.

At the meeting of the British Association at Oxford, in 1860, Professor
Owen repeated these assertions in my presence, and, of course, I
immediately gave them a direct and unqualified contradiction, pledging
myself to justify that unusual procedure elsewhere. I redeemed that
pledge by publishing, in the January number of the 'Natural History