Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 32.djvu/122

112 the only part which can be regarded as a cerebral hemisphere lies laterad of the olfactory lobe. In Dipnoi he finds that the cerebral outgrowth is ventrad. In another paper he says: "In either of these directions in which what may be regarded as the special organ of the mind is projected among these low or generalized forms, there would seem to be mechanical obstacles to any considerable expansion; but dorsally there is opportunity for comparatively unlimited extension, and it is in this direction that the hemispheres begin to develop in the Amphibia and attain such enormous growth in birds and mammals." How far the small brain and presumably stolid intellects brought about the extinction of the huge tertiary mammals may be better understood by the suggestions offered by Professor A. E. Verrill in a lecture at Yale College, entitled "Facts Illustrative of the Darwinian Theory." He shows what an important factor parental instinct is in the evolution of species. He regards the lack of parental care "as one of the probable causes, though usually overlooked, of the extinction of many of the large and powerful reptiles of the Mesozoic age and of the large mammals of the Tertiary." He says: "The very small size of the brain and its low organization in these early animals are now well known, and we are justified in believing that their intelligence or sagacity was correspondingly low. They were doubtless stupid and sluggish in their habits, but probably had great powers of active and passive resistance against correspondingly stupid carnivorous species. But unless the helpless young were protected by their parents, they would quickly have been destroyed; and such species might, in this way, have been rapidly exterminated whenever they came in contact with new forms of carnivorous animals, having the instinct to destroy the new-born young of mammals, and the eggs and young of oviparous reptiles. Thus it would have come about that the more intelligent forms, by the development of the parental instinct for the active protection of their young against their enemies, would have survived longest, and therefore would have transmitted this instinct, with other correlated cerebral developments, to their descendants."

Professor John Fiske, in his "Cosmic Philosophy," arrived at a similar conclusion in regard to early man. He showed that, when variations in intelligence became more important than variations in physical structure, then they were seized upon, to the relative exclusion of the latter.

The derivative theory has not only clearly revealed the fact that animals have been derived from pre-existing forms, but it shows even more clearly that organs have been evolved as well. It is difficult, in a general review of this nature, to separate clearly the two classes of facts.

Professor Cope has traced the genesis of the quadritubercular