Abstract
LONDON. Royal Society, February 19.—Sir William Crookes, president, in the chair.—Prof. G. Elliot Smith: The brain of primitive man, with special reference to the cranial cast and skull of Eoanthropus (“the Piltdown man”). The small brain of Eoanthropus, though definitely human in its characters, represents a more primitive and generalised type than that of the genus Homo. Nevertheless, it can be regarded as a very close approximation to the kind of brain possessed by the earliest representatives of the real Homo, and as the type from which the brains of the different primitive kinds of men-Mousterian, Tas-manian (and Australian), Bushman, negro, &c, no less than those of the other modern human races have been derived, as the result of more or less well-defined specialisations in varying directions. From the features of its brain Pithecanthropus must be included in the family Hominidae, but it and Eoanthropus can be looked upon as divergent specialisations of the original genus of the family. Pithecanthropus represents the unprogressive branch which survived into Pleistocene times before it became extinct; Eoanthropus the progressive phylum from which the genus Homo was derived. Special attention is devoted to the study of the temporal region of the brain, which in all of these fossil men (not excluding Pithecanthropus) reveals features of great morphological interest. The opinion is ex-pressed that the increased size of the brain (as a whole) which is distinctive of the Hominidae, among the Primates, is ultimately related to the acquisition of the power of articulate speech, and that the very earliest representatives of the family must have possessed in some slight degree the definite faculty of intercommunication one with another by means of vocal sounds. The development of asymmetry of the brain was necessarily incidental to the acquisition of human characteristics, and must have been already present in the original Hominidæ.—Prof. A. J. Ewart: Oxidases.—Dr. J. W. W. Stephens: A new malarial parasite of man. The blood-slide in which this parasite occurred came from Pachmari, Central Provinces, India. The peculiarities of the parasite are:—(1) It is extremely amœboid. Thin processes extend across the cell or occur as long tails to more or less ring-shaped bodies. These processes may be several in number, giving the parasite fantastic shapes. (2) The cytoplasm is always scanty; the amoeboid processes are delicate; the parasite has but little bulk. (3) The nuclear chromatin is out of proportion to the bulk of the parasite. It takes the form of bars, rods, strands, curves, forks, patches, &c. Abundance of and marked irregularity in the distribution of the chromatin masses are characteristic of this parasite. It differs from the hitherto described parasites of malaria. The author proposes to call the parasite Plasmodium tenue.— S. B. Schryver: Investigations dealing with the phenomena of “clot” formations. Part ii., The formation of a gel from cholate solutions having many properties analogous to those of cell membranes.—Dorothy J. Lloyd: The influence of the position of the cut upon regeneration in Gunda ulvae. In 1889, Hallez published a paper in which he stated that the difference in the regeneration of Triclads and Polyclads lay in the fact that the former could regenerate a head from the oral surface of a cut made at any level, while the latter could only do so if the regenerating fragment contained the cerebral ganglia. Experiments made with G. ulvae, a. marine Triclad occurring in large numbers at Plymouth, show that this generalisation is not justifiable. G. ulvae is found to differ from most Triclads and to correspond to Polyclads in its mode of regeneration.
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Societies and Academies . Nature 92, 729–731 (1914). https://doi.org/10.1038/092729a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/092729a0