In the year 1857, however, Professor Owen, either in ignorance of these
well-known facts or else unjustifiably suppressing them, submitted to
the Linnaean 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 sub-class was
distinguished from the one below it. Not only do the cerebral
hemispheres overlap and 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 Linnaean
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.
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