A homunculus is a representation of a small human being. Popularized in sixteenth-century alchemy and nineteenth-century fiction, it has historically referred to the creation of a miniature, fully formed human. The concept has roots in preformationism as well as earlier folklore and alchemic traditions. The term is also used for an image of a person with the size of the body parts distorted to represent how much area of the cerebral cortex of the brain is devoted to it. For example, the legs are small but the mouth and hands are large.
