456 



EVOLUTION AND ANIMAL LIFE 



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thumb on each foot. Monkey like in their feet and in their 

 general habit, yet in appearance they have little to suggest 

 affinity with man. In general make-up, they are superficially 

 comparable rather with weasels, squirrels, and bats. 



The New- World monkeys differ widely from the others. 

 Technically they are distinguished by the diverging (platyr- 

 rhine) nostrils, and by the retention of the primitively larger 



number of teeth. Many 

 of them have prehensile 

 tails, and in habit and 

 temper all are very un- 

 like the more hardy and 

 pugnacious monkeys of 

 the Old World. All the 

 Old- World monkeys as 

 well as the apes and 

 man have parallel nos- 

 trils, directed downward 

 (catarrhine) . Their tails, 

 if present, are not pre- 

 hensile, and in their 

 habits and temper they 

 approach progressively 

 toward man. Catarrhine 

 monkeys are known to 

 have existed in the 

 Miocene period. The 

 anthropoid apes repre- 

 sent a high degree of 



advancement within the same group which finds its final ex- 

 treme in the genus Homo. 



Considering structural characters alone, it is readily con- 

 ceivable that man should have had an anthropoid ancestry, 

 that the anthropoids should have sprung from an Old- World 

 monkey stock, and that the Old- World monkeys in turn are 

 derived from the lemurs. It is not supposable that any living 

 species of man has sprung from any extant species of anthropoid 

 ape. The point of juncture is clearly far back in the earlier 

 Tertiary times, but morphological evidence points to the com- 

 mon origin of primitive man and the known anthropoids. It is, 

 of course, certain that the intermediate forms when known 





FIG. 285. Gorilla. 



