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. Gorilla here is the pseudonym for Sir Philip Egerton.163Chapter 4meetings.He had thought that the differences between him and an ape weresuch things as:being able to speak, and make machines, and know right fromwrong, and say your prayers.rather than having.a hippo-potamus major in your brain.He understands that.if a hippo-potamus major is ever discovered in one single ape s brain, nothingwill save your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-greater-greatest-grandmother from having been an apetoo.In an anonymous and well-informed eight-page squib entitled  A Reportof a Sad Case Recently Tried before the Lord Mayor, Owen versus Huxley. (ªgure 4.8), Owen and Huxley are dragged into court for brawling inthe streets and disturbing the peace.The ªght continues in court with muchshouting of  posterior cornu,  hippocampus minor, and so on, asHuxley: Well, as I was saying, Owen and me is in the same trade;and we both cuts up monkeys, and I ªnds something in the brainsof them.Hallo! says I, here s a hippocampus.No, there ain t saysOwen.Look here says I.I can t see it he says and he sets towerriting and haggling about it, and goes and tells everybody, aswhat I ªnds ain t there, and what he ªnds is.At the end of the trial, the Lord Mayor declines to punish either because  nopunishment could reform offendors so incorrigible. He does suggest to Owenthat rather than being bitter at being compared with an ape he might act lesslike one and more like a man.He suggests to Huxley that he is less interestedin the truth than in destroying his rival.Another anonymous pamphlet that year, entitled  Speech of Lord Dun-dreary.on the Great Hippocampus Questions, was also by Kingsley.Theauthors of these parodies not only knew every detail of the controversy but thepersonalities of the combatants and their friends intimately.164The Hi ppocampus Minor and Man s Place in NatureFigure 4.7 Owen and Huxley dancing a jig before the 1865 British Asso-ciation Meeting.Punch, Sept.23, 1865.165Chapter 4166The Hi ppocampus Minor and Man s Place in NatureEvi dence as to Man s Place i n NatureThe School of Mines, Huxley s principal appointment for most of his life,sponsored an evening series of lectures for working men ( vouched for by theiremployers, although Karl Marx managed to attend).Huxley participated withgreat enthusiasm, writing that the working men:are as attentive and intelligent as the best audience I ever lecturedto.In fact they are the best audience I ever had.I am sick ofthe dilettante middle classes.As early as 1860 he began to devote these lectures to evolution and particularlyto the evolution of man, a topic that Darwin avoided in public for anothertwenty years.On March 22, 1861, he wrote to his wife,  My working menstick by me wonderfully, the house being fuller than ever last night.By nextFriday evening they will all be convinced that they are monkeys. 51Soon Huxley expanded these lectures into a book telling Sir Charles Lyell,I mean to give the whole history of the [Owen] business.sothat the paraphrase of Sir Ph.Egerton s line  To which Huxleyreplies that Owen he lies, shall be unmistakable.[See ªgure 4.6.]The book, designed for a lay audience, was Evidence as to Man s Place in Nature.Darwin loved it, exclaiming:  Hurrah the monkey book has come. It wasenormously successful, selling out at once and quickly going through severalmore printings.52The ªrst part,  On the Natural History of the Man-like Apes, is largelya review of travelers accounts of various apes, stressing their humanlike intel-Figure 4.8 Title page of an eight-page squib anonymously published and written byG.Pycroft.In it Owen and Huxley are dragged into court for brawling in the streets overthe hippocampus minor and related matters.167Chapter 4ligence, emotions, and social life.It thus lays the basis for Darwin and Ro-manes s ºorid anthropomorphizing in defense of psychological continuity be-tween humans and animals.When this tendency to attribute high mentalfunctions to animals was reduced by C.Lloyd Morgan s law of parsimony,Occam s razor for students of animal behavior, this continuity argument becamethe basis of modern behavioristic psychology.53The second part,  On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals, isthe heart of the book.It begins with arguments from embryology and celltheory for the fundamental unity of all animals, including, of course, humans.Then the bones, skull, and teeth of humans and apes are discussed, with theconclusion that  the lower Apes and the Gorilla.differ more than the Gorillaand the Man. Next, and it almost seems like the raison d etre for the wholebook, we come to an account of the fundamental similarity of the brain of apesand humans, particularly the possession by both of a posterior lobe, a posteriorhorn, and a hippocampus minor.The account is a twelve-page, step-by-stepargument, but perhaps it had to be since the audience addressed had neverheard of a brain ventricle, let alone the hippocampus minor.At the end of thechapter, Huxley points out that the close similarity of human and ape that hehas just demonstrated proves the validity of Linnaeus s original Primate order,and ends by stating, in a rather offhand manner, that Darwin s theory providesan explanation of the origin of man from ape.Interposed between the second and third parts are six pages of ªne printproviding,  a succinct History of the Controversy respecting the CerebralStructure of Man and the Apes, that is, how Owen  suppressed and deniedthe truth about the hippocampus minor, posterior horn, and posterior lobe, andhow this was now a matter of  personal veracity. The ªnal portion of Man sPlace,  On Some Fossil Remains of Man, deals with the evidence for a fossillink between ape and human, which Huxley admitted was very meager indeed.At the time, judging by a sample of the reviews, Huxley s book wasregarded chieºy as a polemic against Owen, favorably by Huxley s partisanswho were in the majority by now, and unfavorably by Owen s allies.Darwin,natural selection, and even evolution, as distinct from the human s systematic168The Hi ppocampus Minor and Man s Place in Naturestatus, are not major issues in these reviews and indeed they are not majorconcerns in the book.Probably the most inºuential evaluation was that of SirCharles Lyell, Britain s leading geologist and one of its most eminent scientists.Through nine editions his Principles of Geology rejected the idea of evolution [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]