44 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



however, cannot be overlooked by the thinking mind. They are so 

 great that if we assumed the theory of degeneracy to be true, and so 

 were willing to throw the whole animal kingdom backward on its tail 

 instead of forward on its feet, we might consider them to be degener- 

 ate and " wild" men. And it is interesting to find that this is what 

 they were formerly held to be. The early pictures of the orang and 

 chimpanzee exemplify this notion by giving them perfectly human 

 features and erect position, brutalized only by their hairy body. They 

 were, in fact, assumed to be a very abandoned kind of man, and not a 

 very elevated kind of monkey. It is thought by some tribes of men 

 to this day that the apes could talk if they would, but they are afraid 

 that if they do they will be made slaves of and obliged to work. From 

 the naked white skin, through the yellow and red to the black and then 

 to the black with hair, does, indeed, seem a gradual transition ; and, if 

 we concede the erect posture, the admission of the ape into the human 

 family carries with it no little show of justice. It is not so long ago 

 that we denied human rights, and both openly and impliedly consan- 

 guinity, to the negro, as to make it impossible that we should not come 

 to regard the gorilla in a more affectionate light than we do at present. 

 But, in point of fact, the different races of mankind represent a kinship 

 remote in proportion to their structural differences ; and most of us, 

 perhaps, would be willing to admit at once the truth of this proposition. 

 Science insists that it is true throughout the animal world, and expects 

 that the time will come when it will be acknowledged, and our behavior 

 improved by an increasing kindness on our part to our inferior and 

 w r eaker fellow-inhabitants of the earth. The proof of the evolution of 

 man we find first in the fact that for every bone and muscle or organ 

 in man there is a corresponding one in the anthropoid apes. Having 

 shown in this way that man is not separable from his physical charac- 

 teristics, science enters into a comparison with regard to the difference 

 in brain-power. The mass of the brain, as judged by the cubical contents 

 of the cranium, we have seen, can be no certain criterion for the intelli- 

 gence, but only of comparative value, because it was so variable in the 

 apes and man. It is, however, a guide from a physiological point of 

 view by which we can estimate an advance in thinking powers through- 

 out the animal kingdom. It has been amply shown by Prof. Marsh that, 

 as a whole, the proportion of the brain-case has increased through the 

 succession of fossil vertebrate life from the time when coal was formed 

 up to the present. And it can be shown that this proportion is greater 

 in man to-day as compared with existing mammals. When we come 

 to the structure of the mass of the brain, that of man offers no perceiv- 

 able difference of importance from that of certain apes. The discussion 

 on this point has been fully entered into by distinguished anatomists, 

 and need not be detailed in this place. Alone, the weight offers a dif-. 

 ference. The heaviest human brain known is given at 1,872 grammes, 

 the lightest brain of a sane person 907 grammes, both these extremes 



