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ISogal Institution of Sreat ISritain.
WEEKLY EVENING MEETING,
Friday, January 24, 1862.
,
The Rev. John Barlow, M.A. F.R.S. Vice-President,
in the Chair. 5
/ .
George Rolleston, M.D.
LINACRE PROFESSOR OF PHYSIOLOGY, OXFORD.
On the Affinities and Differences between the Brain of Man and the
Brains of certain Animals.
The speaker having commenced by giving a short explanation of his
diagrams of human and other brains, proceeded to enumerate the several
sets of opinions which men might bring with them to an investigation
of his subject. It was possible to combine either view of the origin
of species with either of the two creeds of the idealist or of the
materialist; and to the four sets of opinions thus made up, a fifth—
that of Positivism—must be added. It was not asserted that these
conflicting theories could all be true simultaneously ; but the facts to
be detailed were elastic enough to bear compression within any one of
those formulas.
Beginning with the internal anatomy of the brains which he had to
compare and contrast, the speaker said that the question as between
man and the ape might be stated thus :—Has the ape such a biradiate,
two-horned ventricular cavity within its brain as has the dog, or has it
not rather such a one as has man himself, triradiate and three-horned ?
By the aid of drawings of dissected brains of the dog, of an old-world
and of a new-world monkey, and of man, it was seen that the interior
of the simious brain was even more pre-eminently a three-horned
cavity than was that of the human brain; and that the new-world
monkey contrasted with man to even greater advantage in this, and the
disputed point of the closely-allied hippocampus minor, than did the
much more anthropomorphous old-world ape. Tiedemann’s retracta
tion of his error as to the processus digitati of the greater hippocampus
was alluded to; the speaker insisting that though such discoveries
and rectifications might seem of weight and consequence to persons
imbued, as was Tiedemann, with materialistic views, they possessed no
anthropological interest whatever for the idealist.
Certain anatomical plates of Eustachius’, published some 150 years
ago, were shown to give representations of the interior of the human
brain which coincided in all points with figures of the interior of the
�2
Professor Rolleston on the
[Jan. 24,
brain of the orang, which had been published within the current month
by two Dutch anatomists, in the English ‘ Natural History Review.’
Passing, then, from the anatomy of the internal to that of the
external surface of the brain, the speaker said that the points of agree
ment and of difference upon which he should have to dwell could be
arranged under two heads—either they were such as the eye could
judge of even though its owner were not an anatomist ex professo,
depending a§ they did upon general outline and configuration ; or they
were such as a deeply-going analysis of the convolutions alone could
elicit.
Under the first head were enumerated the more elegantly ovoidal
and tapering shape, the more accurate semicircularity of the superior,
and the irregularity of the inferior boundary line, as signs of defect
and diminisliment in the ape’s brain ; but the outcropping of the
cerebellum from beneath the overlying cerebral hemispheres, which
had been so much insisted upon as a distinctive mark of the inferiority
of the simious encephalon, was shown to depend largely upon the
changes of relative position which the several masses of nervous matter,
comprised under the one term “ encephalon,” undergo when they are
removed from their supporting brain-case.
The absolute necessity of comparing the configuration and propor
tions of brains preserved in spirits with the configuration and propor
tions of plaster-casts of the cavities they occupied during life, was
dwelt upon with special reference to Mr. Marshall’s observations upon
this point in the ‘ Natural History Review’ for July, 1861. It was in
the gorilla alone of the Simiadae that M. Gratiolet (‘ Comptes Rendus,’
1860, p. 803) had found the posterior cerebral lobes doing otherwise
than “recouvrant completement le cerveletand it was this peculi
arity, together with other characteristics of its encephalon and other
structures, which had induced him to speak of it as “ the last, the most
degraded of all the anthropomorphous apes
and to class it with the
baboons, whilst he ranked the chimpanzee with the macaques, and the
orang with the gibbons.
The last point of general configuration and measurement in which
the simious was contrasted with the human brain was that of their
several altitudes ; and it was shown that whilst men differed but little
inter se as to the height of their brains, it was precisely in this very
dimension that they differed, perhaps more widely than in any other,
from all apes whatsoever.
After expressing his sense of the obligations which anatomy owed
to M. Gratiolet’s analysis of the cerebral convolutions, the speaker
proceeded to give in detail the points of resemblance and of contrast
which that analysis had enabled us to detect as subsisting between
human or simious brains. The chief points in which, under this head,
the human was seen to contrast to advantage with the ape’s brain were
two. First: The absence in man of “ the external perpendicular
fissure,” or, in other words, the filling up in him of what is more or
less of a chasm in the ape, by a large quadrangular mass of convolu-
�18621.]
x
Brain of Man and the Brains of certain Animals.
3
tions. Second : The much greater size and complexity of the frontal
lobes. But it was shown that these differences affected what have
been called “ secondary ” and “ tertiary ” convolutions, and indeed
the latter of these chiefly, whilst the “ primary ” convolutions, the
great typical lines and ridges, were the same in both classes of brains.
The apparatus for the mechanical, (and possibly also physiological,)
unification of the hemispheres, which is known as the corpus callosum,
was stated to have in man just double the sectional area which it had
in the apes ; whilst the very lowest weight which an adult and healthy
human encephalon was recorded to have fallen to, was yet double, and
more than double, of the very highest which had ever been attained
in the weighing of an ape’s brain.
The results of the anatomical investigation were summed up thus.
“ This doubly and more than doubly greater weight, the doubly
greater corpus callosum, that subquadrate lobule, lettered a, and yS in
the diagram, those complexly convoluted frontal lobes, 1, 2, and 3, are,
I believe, the four great points in which the human brain asserts its
superiority over that of the ape.”
The metaphysical or anthropological bearings of the investigation
might be summed up thus. How similar soever the simious might
be shown to be to the human brain, the argument which Bossuet drew
thence for the essential difference between mind and matter, would
but be rendered the stronger. If organs are common to man and to
brutes, one is necessarily forced to the conclusion that intelligence is
not attached to organs; and the cogency of this argument, M. St.
Hilaire remarks, increases as the number of organs, common to the
two subjects of comparison, becomes more numerous and their resem
blance more striking.
The anatomist, however, though not obliged to concede, could yet
afford to argue upon, the assumption that mind and matter always
vary concomitantly. For, granting this, it by no means followed, that,
of the two terms of the comparison, mind was the second, body the
first. The effects of prolonged mental states of different natures, the
operation of education in marring or in elevating the physical
features, the instinctive value which we all give to physiognomy,
whether before us in actuality, or reproduced and preserved for us
by art, as affording indications of character, were glanced at as lines
of evidence to show that the mind might modify, whilst the body was
adapted ; that the immaterial might fashion, whilst the corporal was
conformed into accordance with it. “ All alike, when coldly and
dispassionately viewed as concomitantly varying phenomena, lead us
to hold that our higher and diviner life is not a mere result of the
abundance of our convolutions. How harmony may have come to
exist between them our faculties are incompetent either to decide or
to discover; but this shortcoming of man’s intelligence affects neither
his duties nor his hopes, neither his fears nor his aspirations.”
[G-. R.J
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Title
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On the affinities and differences between the brain of man and the brains of certain animals
Creator
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Rolleston, George
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 3 p. ; 22 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. The Rev. John Barlow in the Chair. Read at the weekly evening meeting Friday, January 24, 1862
Publisher
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Royal Instiution of Great Britain
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1862
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G5282
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (On the affinities and differences between the brain of man and the brains of certain animals), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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Text
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English
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Biology
Anatomy
Animals
Anthropology
Brain
Comparative Anatomy
Conway Tracts
Human beings