Man's Place in Nature, and Other EssaysHuxley, Thomas Henry
Science
Man's Place in Nature, and Other Essays
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Apes; Ethnology; Human beings -- Origin; Indo-Europeans
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 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 preceding subclass was
distinguished from the one below it. Not only do the cerebral
hemispheres overlap 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 Linnæan 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
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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