f his position might have been
as apparent to Professor Owen as it was to every one else; but, so far
from retracting the grave errors into which he had fallen, Professor
Owen has persisted in and reiterated them; first, in a lecture delivered
before the Royal Institution on the 19th of March, 1861, which is
admitted to have been accurately reproduced in the 'Athenaeum' for the
23rd of the same month, in a letter addressed by Professor Owen to that
journal on the 30th of March. The 'Athenaeum report was accompanied by
a diagram purporting to represent a Gorilla's brain, but in reality so
extraordinary a misrepresentation, that Professor Owen substantially,
though not explicitly, withdraws it in the letter in question. In
amending this error, however, Professor Owen fell into another of
much graver import, as his communication concludes with the following
paragraph: "For the true proportion in which the cerebrum covers the
cerebellum in the highest Apes, reference should be made to the figure
of the undissected brain of the Chimpanzee in my 'Reade's Lecture on the
Classification, etc., of the Mammalia', p. 25, fig. 7, 8 vo. 1859."

It would not be credible, if it were not unfortunately true, that this
figure, to which the trusting public is referred, without a word of
qualification, "for the true proportion in which the cerebrum covers the
cerebellum in the highest Apes," is exactly that unacknowledged copy of
Schroeder van der Kolk and Vrolik's figure whose utter inaccuracy had
been pointed out years before by Gratiolet, and had been brought to
Professor Owen's knowledge by myself in the passage of my article in the
'Natural History Review' above quoted.

I drew public attention to this circumstance again in my reply to
Professor Owen, published in the 'Athenaeum' for April 13th, 1861; but
the exploded figure was reproduced once more by Professor Owen, without
the slightest allusion to its inaccuracy, in the 'Annals of Natural
History' for June 1861!

This proved too much for the patience of the original authors of the
figure, Messrs. Schroeder van der Kolk and Vrolik, who, in a note
addressed to the Academy of Amsterdam, of which they were members,
declared themselves to be, though decided opponents of all forms of the
doctrine of progressive development, above all things, lovers of truth:
and that, therefore, at whatever risk of seeming to lend support to
views which they disliked, they felt it their duty to take th