Abstract
THE best results in science have been obtained mostly by combining two hitherto separate branches or methods. The author of the work before us is a daughter of the late Prof. Ludwig Edinger, who is well known as one of the founders of the comparative anatomy of the brain. She grew up, therefore, in a very centre of comparative neurology, and having also studied palæontology from the geological point of view, she joined these two branches in a remarkable manner in palæoneurology, which is not an entirely new combination, but has never been practised so thoroughly and methodically. The chance to make errors in this field is greater than anywhere else. For, as the author acknowledges in the very beginning of her book, a fossil thigh-bone is a thigh-bone anyhow, but a ‘fossil brain’ is not a brain at all: it is—with a few exceptions—only a natural (petrified) or artificial endocranial cast of a fossil skull. this fact we know more of the central nervous system of many fossil animals than, for example, of their intestines, but to interpret the data with accuracy we must begin by studying in recent animals the relations between the brain and the form of the endocranial cavity, which is in many cases much more spacious than would be necessary to contain the brain only. These and other methodical and technical matters are discussed in detail and elucidated with many illustrations in the general part (pp. 9–100) of the book.
Die fossilen Gehirne.
Tilly Edinger. Pp. 249. (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1929.) 36 gold marks.
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VAN DER FEEN, P. Die fossilen Gehirne . Nature 125, 738 (1930). https://doi.org/10.1038/125738a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/125738a0