The Project Gutenberg EBook of Note on the Resemblances and Differences in
the Structure and the Development of Brain in Man and the Apes, by Thomas Henry Huxley

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Title: Note on the Resemblances and Differences in the Structure and the Development of Brain in Man and the Apes

Author: Thomas Henry Huxley

Posting Date: November 5, 2008 [EBook #2354]
Release Date: October, 2000

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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NOTE ON THE RESEMBLANCES AND DIFFERENCES IN THE STRUCTURE
AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE BRAIN IN MAN AND APES

BY

PROFESSOR T. H. HUXLEY, F.R.S.

[This essay is taken from 'The Descent of Man and Selection in relation
to Sex' by Charles Darwin where it appears at the end of Chapter VII
which is also the end of Part I. Footnotes are numbered as they appear
in 'The Descent of Man.']

The controversy respecting the nature and the extent of the differences
in the structure of the brain in man and the apes, which arose some
fifteen years ago, has not yet come to an end, though the subject
matter of the dispute is, at present, totally different from what it
was formerly. It was originally asserted and re-asserted, with
singular pertinacity, that the brain of all the apes, even the highest,
differs from that of man, in the absence of such conspicuous structures
as the posterior lobes of the cerebral hemispheres, with the posterior
cornu of the lateral ventricle and the hippocampus minor, contained in
those lobes, which are so obvious in man.

But the truth that the three structures in question are as well
developed in apes' as in human brains, or even better; and that it is
characteristic of all the Primates (if we exclude the Lemurs) to have
these parts well developed, stands at present on as secure a basis as
any proposition in comparative anatomy. Moreover, it is admitted by
every one of the long series of anatomists who, of late years, have
paid special attention to the arrangement of the complicated sulci and
gyri which appear upon the surface of the cerebral hemispher