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REVIEWS.

his. For this reason they may very usefully be added to the definition of the human family.

"On the contrary, the other distinctive characters of man mentioned or indicated by authors are no longer distinctive and absolute but are merely relative; are differences of degree and not of kind.

"It is no longer a question of anatomical or physical features, possessed by man and not by the apes, or by the apes and not by man, but of features common to man and to a part of, or even to all, apes; merely more or less marked in him than in them. So that these features would tend, if they existed alone, to make of Man, considered in a classificatory aspect, not a family apart from all animals, but the first genus of the family of apes. By the most of them he would be to the Chimpanzees and to the Orangs, what these are to the Cercopitheci and Macsci, and these to the lower apes; aa additional term at the head of a common series.

"The facts of this second order, important as many of them may be in a physiological point of view, are far less so than the foregoing in their taxonomic aspect, and we may be permitted to pass more rapidly over them; Indeed to restrict ourselves to At enumeration of those which authors have considered as particularly characteristic"

Those of our readers who have followed the controversy respecting the brain of Apes and Man, if that can be dignified by the name of controversv where all the facts are on one side and mere empty assertion on the other, will be amused on discovering the nature of the first of these "secondary facts" which M. St. Hilaire treats so cavalierly.

"The first, the most important of all, so important that one would be inclined, at first sight, to consider them as the characteristics par excellence of man, are those presented by the encephalon, particularly the cerebral hemispheres. If there is an abyss between the intelligence of man and that of the brute, ought not a large interval to exist between his cerebral characters and those of animals? Such a conclusion would certainly follow very logically from the doctrines held by many physiologists, regarding the functions of the brain, and particularly of the convolutions, but it is a conclusion, most distinctly refuted by the comparative examination of man and animals. Here, indeed, the facts of our cerebral structure exhibit, not a specially and exclusiyely human structure, but a higher degree of an of an organization which is found in the apes; merely relative, instead of absolute differences. "The great development of the anterior cerebral lobes and of the corpus callasum, the multitude of the convolutions and sulci, the depth of the latter and consequently the considerable extent of the surface of the cerebrum, are, according to authors, the fire principal characters by which the human brain is particularly distinguished. These are, in fact, so many indubitable marks of the superiority of man over animals; those species which, in the totality of their organization, resemble him most, are inferior to him in these respects. But are they very inferior? Assuredly I shall not go so far as to say, with Bory de St. Vincent, that between the brain of the Orang and that Of Man there exist "no more essential differences than those which obtain between the same parts in different individuals of our own species;" a conclusion which this naturalist, too ready to interpret facts according to his own views, professes to draw from the beautiful researches of Tiedemann on the encephalon of the Orang, as compared with that of Man. But that which is certain, which results not merely from Tiedemann's observations, but from those of M. Serres and of all the masters of science; from all those also which have been made of late, and to which I have had the advantage of being able to add my own upon many points; is this proposition, which no one will confound with the assertion of Bory St. Vincent: by so much as, in the development of the anterior cerebral lobes, of the corpus callosum, of the convolutions and the extent of his cerebral surface, Man surpasses even the highest apes; by so much are these, and chiefly the Orang, superior in the same respects to the first apes of the second tribe (Cynopithe-