The “Affenspalte” in Human Brains

Abstract

WILL you kindly allow me the privilege of using your columns for the following note? In a recent number of the Anatomischer Anzeiger Prof. Elliott Smith published a most interesting forecast of an extensive work which he has in hand, dealing particularly with the occurrence in human brains of an occipital operculum; this occurrence had been considered previously as very exceptional, but Prof. Elliott Smith is able to show that this is far from being the case. The presence of such an occipital operculum implies the existence, in the cerebral hemisphere possessing it, of a sulcus, called by Prof. Elliott Smith the sulcus lunatus, which is strictly comparable to, if not absolutely identical with, the “Affenspalte” in so typical of the brains of Simiidæ and Cercopithecidæ.