Page:Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature.djvu/139

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to the year 1857 all anatomists of authority, who had occupied themselves with the cerebral structure of the Apes—Cuvier, Tiedemann, Sandifort, Vrolik, Isidore G. St. Hilaire, Schroeder van der Kolk, Gratiolet—were agreed that the brain of the Ape possesses a.

Tiedemann, in 1825, figured and acknowledged in the text of his 'Icones,' the existence of the of the lateral ventricle in the Apes, not only under the title of 'Scrobiculus parvus loco cornu posterioris'—a fact which has been paraded—but as 'cornu posterius' (Icones, p. 54), a circumstance which has been, as sedulously, kept in the back ground.

Cuvier (Lecons, T. iii. p. 103) says, "the anterior or lateral ventricles possess a digital cavity [posterior cornu] only in Man and 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 , 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 Linnæan 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