PITHECOID MAN. 185 



bigger and better brain than that of the orang-outang or the 

 chimpanzee, and the chest is more human in shape than that of 

 the gibbon. But it is not so much perhaps in these physical 

 changes as in the general cast of the countenance and the peculiar 

 expression of the eye that the variation toward intellectuality 

 and humanity is most clearly reflected. A single tear trembling 

 on the mother's cheek bears witness to the awakening of a kind 

 of consciousness and the stirrings of an emotional nature wholly 

 foreign to the simian breast, and seems a presentiment of all the 

 future woes and miseries of the race. The father's sterner fea- 

 tures radiate with paternal pride mingled with a certain thought- 

 fulness and shadowed by vague anxiety, and, although his sus- 

 ceptibilities are less easily excited and his solicitudes less lively 

 than those of his tender-hearted helpmate, he feels the burden of 

 his responsibilities, lives in the future as well as in the past and 

 present, and already answers to Shakespeare's definition of man 

 as a being that "looks before and after." It is the masterly de- 

 lineation of these spiritual qualities that reveals the peculiar pre- 

 eminence of Max as an artist and proves the accuracy of his ob- 

 servations and deductions as an anthropologist. The face of the 

 nursling is invisible, but the shapeliness of the head and the sym- 

 metrical proportions of the hands pressing the mother's breast 

 are remarkably human and preclude the possibility of any ata- 

 vistic reversion in their offspring. Nearly a century ago the Ger- 

 man philosopher and psychologist, J, F. Herbart, stated very suc- 

 cinctly the superiority of man's physical structure and constitu- 

 tion in promoting his mental development : " He has hands, he 

 has speech, he lives through a long, helpless infancy." The Pithe- 

 canthropus alalus fulfills only the first and third of these condi- 

 tions, but with an additional convolution of the lobes of the brain 

 and a slight modification of the larynx he will acquire the faculty 

 of articulate speech, on which the rapid and progressive growth 

 of the intellectual capacities and moral character so largely 

 depends. 



We often complain, says the report of the American University Extension 

 Society, that the foreigners among us debauch our politics by consenting to serve 

 as mere instruments of designing politicians; but we must remember that these 

 same designing politicians are the only people who have been willing hitherto to 

 give any attention whatever to tbe political education of these classes of our citi- 

 zens. Tiie University Extension Society claims to have made the first systematic 

 effort toward helping our foreign-born citizens to qualify themselves for their new 

 position. Courses have been given in quarters of the city (Philadelphia) where 

 recent immigrants have attended them in considerable numbers. "It was pa- 

 thetic" to observe the eagerness with which audiences of Russian Jews were 

 bent on learning something of the government and institutions of their adopted 

 country, 



VOL. XL VI. 15 



