Science, matter, and immortality / by Ronald Campbell Macfie.

  • Macfie, Ronald Campbell, 1867-1931.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Science, matter, and immortality / by Ronald Campbell Macfie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    205/382 (page 191)
    in the stem form is supposed to have had such a formation and capacity as this Javanese fossil skull. If the theory of the biologists be correct, the gibbon, the orang, the chimpanzee, the gorilla, and man can all regard this skull as the skull of a near relation. But, after all, brain-cases are not so important as brains, and perhaps in brains we may find a denial of our ape ancestry. Alas ! our brains are also the brains of an ape. The brains of the anthropoid apes exactly resemble the brains of a man. They have the same fissures, the same convolutions, the same lobes, and, so far as can be determined, the same functional areas. There is nothing in the brain of a Shakespeare that cannot be found in the brain of a baboon. Professor Huxley states :— “ As to the convolutions, the brains of the apes exhibit every stage of progress from the almost smooth brain of the marmoset to the orang and chimpanzee, which fall but little below man. And it is most remarkable that as soon as all the principal sulci (fissures) appear, the pattern accord- ing to which they are arranged is identical with that of the corresponding sulci of man .... So far as cerebral structure goes, therefore, it is clear that man differs less from the chimpanzee and orang than these do even from the monkeys, and