Human physiology, with which is incorporated much of the elementary part of the Institutiones physiologicae of J.F. Blumenbach.

  • Elliotson, John, 1791-1868.
Date:
1840
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Human physiology, with which is incorporated much of the elementary part of the Institutiones physiologicae of J.F. Blumenbach. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    were their situation so changed, the provision for the sitting pos- ture would be comparatively useless. While some, perversely desirous of degrading their race, have attempted to remove a splendid distinction by asserting that we are constructed for all fours, others with equal perverseness and ignorance have asserted that monkeys are destined for the upright posture. The monkey tribe, it is true, maintain the erect posture less awkwardly than other brutes with four extremities, but they cannot maintain it long, and, while in it, they bend their knees and body; they are insecure and tottering, and glad to rest upon a stick; their feet, too, instead of being spread for support, are coiled up as if to grasp something. In fact their structure proves them to be neither biped nor quadruped, but four-handed, ani- mals. They live naturally in trees, and are furnished with four hands for grasping the branches and gathering their food. Of their four hands the posterior are even the more perfect, and are in no instance destitute of a thumb, although, like the thumbs of all the quadrumana, so insignificant as to have been termed by Eustachius, ** omnino ridiculus; whereas the anterior hands of one variety [simia pa?iiscus) have not this organ. The whole length of the orang utan, it may be mentioned, falls very much short of ours. It was anciently supposed that man, because gifted with the highest mental endowments, possessed the largest of all brains. But as elephants and whales surpass him in this respect, and the sagacious monkey and dog have smaller brains than the com- paratively stupid ass, ox, and hog, the opinion was relinquished by the moderns, and man was said only to have the largest brain in proportion to the size of his body. But as more extensive observation proved canary and other birds, and some varieties of the monkey tribe, to have larger brains than man in proportion to the body, and several mammalia to equal him in this particular, and as rats and mice too surpass the dog, the horse, and the elephant, in the comparative bulk of their brains, this opinion also gave way, in its turn, to that of Sommerring, — that man possesses the largest brain in comparison with the nerves arising from it. This has not yet been contradicted, although the com- parative size of the brain to the nerves originating from it (grant- ing that they onginate from it) is not an accurate measure of the faculties, because the seal has in proportion to its nerves a larger