I.] GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS. 3 



tinguished from another, but those more general qualities of 

 body and mind, by which man himself was already distinguished 

 from all the other anthropoid groups. 



Till recently this statement must have been regarded as mere 

 speculation. But it acquires a large degree of probability, if not 

 absolute certainty, by the remains of Pithecanthropus erectus, found 

 in 1892 by Dr Eugene Dubois in the pliocene beds of East Java 1 , 

 that is, the very region which more than one eminent naturalist 

 had pointed to as the probable original home of mankind. 



Since their discovery these remains have been subjected to the 

 strictest scientific scrutiny, with the result that their 



But all sprung 



human character has been placed beyond reason- from the PH O - 

 able doubt. They have, indeed, been described 

 by some anatomists as rather pre-human than actually human 2 . 

 but nobody now denies that they at least represent a form inter- 

 mediate between man and the higher apes, or rather between man 

 and the generalised Simian prototype, which is practically the 

 same thing. They do not bridge over the impassable gap between 

 Man and Gorilla or Chimpanzee ; but they form, none the less, a 

 true link, which brings Man much nearer than before to the 

 common stem from which all have diverged 3 . 



No one has studied the question more carefully than M. L. 

 Manouvrier, who concludes that Homo javanensis walked erect, was 

 about the medium height, and a true precursor, possibly a direct 

 ancestor, of man. Virchow's usual suggestion that 

 the skull was "pathological," such as might be Man/'" 

 picked up anywhere, is severely handled ; it is 



1 Eth. p. 144. 



2 O. C. Marsh, Amer. J. of Sc. June, 1896. 



3 They also supply some of the essential elements of a human prototype, so 

 that Virchow's assertion that " Noch ist kein einheitlicher Urtypus fur die 

 Menschen festgestellt " (Rassenbildung &c., 1896, p. 5) no longer holds good. 

 So also is turned aside the shaft of the polygenists, whose theory " dispenses 

 with a cradle of mankind which causes the monogenists so much brain- 

 cudgelling. We no longer need to find a single centre for man, and then start 

 him on hypothetical wanderings over the globe" (Ehrenreich, op. cit. p. 21). 

 The single centre, and the hypothetical wanderings, it may now be retorted, 

 no longer present any serious difficulties, while the objections to the polygenist 

 view remain unanswered and unanswerable (Eth. p. 156 sq.). 



I 2 



