MEN AND APES 585 



Ape, and quite as great as or even a trifle greater than the cranial 

 capacity of some female Australians and Veddahs. But as these 

 latter are not 5 feet in height, the Ape-like man had really a 

 less capacious cerebral cavity. The skull in its profile outline 

 stands roughly midway between that of a young Chimpanzee 

 (young in order to do away with the secondary modifications 

 caused by the crest) and the lowest human skull, that of 

 Neanderthal Man. This creature is truly, as Professor Haeckel 

 put it, " the long searched for ' missing link,' " in other words 

 represents " the commencement of humanity." 



The remains of Apes, more distinctly Apes than Pithecanthropus, 

 are known from Miocene strata of France. Two genera, Plio- 

 pithecus and Dryopithecus, are known. The former appears to be 

 close to Hylobates. Dryopithecus is more Man-like than any 

 other, and seems to have been as large as a Chimpanzee. The 

 incisors are human in their relatively small size. But it has 

 been pointed out that the long and narrow symphysis of the 

 lower jaw is a point of likeness to the Cercopithecidae. 



Fam. 3. Hominidae. Apart from Pithecanthropus, which per- 

 haps is a member of this family, but whose remains permit us to 

 leave it among the Simiidae, at least for the present, the family 

 Hominidae contains but one genus, Homo, and probably but one 

 species, H. sapiens. The characters of the family may therefore 

 be merged in those of the genus. 1 



Though it is easy enough to distinguish a Man from an Ape, it 

 is by no means easy to find absolutely distinctive characters which 

 are other than " relative." As Professor Haeckel has pointed out, 

 there are really only four characters which differentiate Man : 

 these are the erect walk, and the consequent modification of the 

 fore- and hind-limbs to that position ; the existence of articulate 

 speech ; the faculty of reason. Whether one body of psycholo- 

 gists are right who argue that reason is a distinctive human 

 attribute, not to be confused with the apparent reasoning powers 

 of lower animals, or whether others are justified in separating 

 Man only in degree from the lower animals, it is clear that this 

 very diversity of opinion prevents us for the present from utilising 

 such characters as absolute differences. In any case the dis- 

 cussion of these matters is beyond the scope of the present book. 



1 See especially Wiedersheim, The Structure of Han, transl. by Howes, London, 



1895. 



