Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/506

486 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. 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. Grratiolet's comments on the defects of their two figures (figs. 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.'

As the two memoirs before alluded to by us (p. 408), the one by Mr. Darwin on 'Natural Selection,' and the other by Mr. Wallace 'On the Tendency of Varieties to depart