ST, HILAIEE ON THE SYSTEMATIC POSITION OF MAN. 5 



* Manus dua, pedes bini,' therefore, is no distinctive character of 

 man ; but, nevertheless, we may quite agree with all but the two last 

 paragraphs of the following statement by M. St. Hilaire, if for ' hands' 

 we read " prehensile terminal limb segments" : — 



" Whence it follows that the existence of posterior ' hands,' when there is only- 

 one pair, or of more perfect ' hands' on the posterior limbs when there are two paii", 

 is a character common to a great number of Mammals, of very different families. 

 A single being presents us with the inverse an-angement ; and the creature which 

 is distinguished by forming so rare and remarkable an exception, the creature which 

 in this respect stands alone, is Man. 



" And by this circumstance the views of those authors who have attributed to 

 the himian group the value of a family, and not merely of a genus, are justified 

 still more definitely than by the character derived from the vertical attitude. In almost 

 every other respect, man is far nearer the apes than the apes are to the lemurs, and 

 than these are to the lowest Quadrumana. We shall even see that, under many 

 aspects, he becomes confounded, organically, with the first mentioned. By the 

 very characteristic conformation of his extremities, he is, on the other hand, far 

 more distant from the apes than the latter are, not only from tlie lemurs and lowest 

 Piimates, but even fi-om a great number of Marsupials, 



" So that here we find, on the one hand, man by himself— on the other, and 

 separated from hun by a vast intenal, all the animals with hands." — (P. 208.) 



In the last- paragraphs here cited, M. St. Hilaire appears to us 

 to have very greatly exaggerated the value of the deviation of 

 the foot of man from that of the apes ; for the diiferences between 

 the foot of man and that of the chimpanzee, or that of the gorilla, are 

 assuredly less than those between the foot of any Simian or Prosimian 

 and that of Oaleointhecus ; and the term " vast interval" is hardly 

 applicable to a separation which, as M. St. Hilaire expressly states, is 

 only sufficient to justify the separation of Man as a distinct family. 



M. St. Hilaire next considers the characters of the teeth of man, 

 adverting to the well-known fact that the principal difference from 

 the dentition of the apes lies in the shortness of the canines, and the 

 consequent absence of that diastema, or interval between the incisors 

 and canine in the upper jaw, and the premolars and canine in the 

 lower jaw, which is present in the apes ; and repeating the statement 

 of Cuvier, that a similar equality and serial continuity of the teeth are 

 only to be met wdth iu the Anoplotherium. However, an approxima- 

 tion to these characters is found also in some of the Insectivora, 

 animals far more closely allied to the Primates than is the fossil 

 ungulate. 



The singular peciJiarities of the distribution of the hair on the 

 human body — a distribution which is unique in the animal kingdom 

 — are next discussed; and it is sho\\Ti that, in this respect even, the 

 higher apes are more similar to man than to the lower apes. The 

 argument which follows (sect. xi. p. 218) bears so definitely upon a 

 question which has been largely discussed in the pages of this Review, 

 that we must give it in full : — 



" The characters derived from the equality and the contiguity of the teeth and 

 the partial nudity of the skin are far from being as important as those which pre- 

 ceded them, but they are very marked: they place man, in two additional respects, 

 in very clear opposition with the animals whose organization most closely approaches 



