550 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



M. de Mortillet gave in another form his view of the sort of 

 creature the hypothetical anthropopithecus should be in a paper on 

 Tertiary Man, read before the Anthropological Section of the French 

 Association for the Advancement of Science in 1885, when he said 

 the question was not to find whether man already existed in the 

 Tertiary epoch as he exists at the present day. Animals varied from 

 one geological epoch to another, and the higher the animals the 

 greater was the variation. It was to be inferred, therefore, that man 

 would vary more rapidly than the other mammals. The problem 

 was to discover in the Tertiary period an ancestral form of man a 

 predecessor of the man of historical times. There were, he affirmed, 

 unquestionably in the Tertiary strata objects which implied the exist- 

 ence of an intelligent being — animals less intelligent than existing 

 man, but much more intelligent than existing apes. While the skele- 

 ton of this ancestral form of man had not yet been discovered, he 

 had made himself known to us in the clearest manner by his works. 

 The general opinion of the meeting after hearing M. de Mortillet's 

 paper is said to have been that there could be no longer any doubt 

 of the existence of the supposed ancestral form of man in the Ter- 

 tiary period. 



The discovery in Java, announced by Dr. Dubois, in 1896, of 

 fossil remains presenting structural characteristics between those of 

 man and those of the monkey, to which the name Pithecanthropus 

 erectus was given, were accepted with hardly a question by M. de 

 Mortillet and his colleagues as confirming his views. 



At a banquet given to M. de Mortillet, May 1, 1884, by a num- 

 ber of anthropologists, when his portrait was presented to him, the 

 hall was decorated for the occasion with a life-size picture of an 

 ancient Gaul, executed according to his latest researches. The man 

 was represented as having no hair on his body; with very long arms 

 and very powerful muscles; his feet capable of being used in climbing 

 trees, but with toes not opposable; his jaw strongly prognathous, but 

 not at all equal to that of an anthropoid ape; his breadth strongly com- 

 pressed laterally and his abdomen prominent; the skin not negroid, 

 but of our present color; and the expression of his face was about as 

 intelligent as that of an Australian. 



In his Le Prehistorique M. de Mortillet attempted to determine 

 how far distant was the epoch when Homo sapiens first appeared on 

 the earth, by estimating the rate of progression of blocks which were 

 carried by former ice fields, as he had observed them in Switzerland 

 with Agassiz. His conclusion was that more than two hundred 

 thousand years had elapsed since that event. 



In 1894 M. de Mortillet proposed in the Societe d' Anthropologic 

 an important reform in chronology. Pointing out the inconvenience 



