THE ARYAN QUESTION AND PREHISTORIC MAN. 513 



my old friend of the Neanderthal among normal men, which has 

 been going on of late years. It has come to be generally admitted 

 that his remarkable cranium is no more than a strongly marked 

 example of a type which occurs, not only among other prehistoric 

 men, but is met with, sporadically, among the moderns ; and that, 

 after all, I was not so wrong as I ought to have been, when I in- 

 dicated such points of similarity among the skulls found in our 

 river-beds and among the native races of Australia.* However, 

 doubts still clung about the geological age of the various deposits 

 in which skulls of the Neanderthal type were subsequently found ; 

 and it was not until the year 1886 that two highly competent 

 observers, Messrs. Fraipont and Lohest, the one an anatomist, 

 the other a geologist, furnished us with evidence such as will 

 bear severe criticism. At the mouth of a cave in the commune 

 of Spy, in the Belgian province of Namur, Messrs. Fraipont and 

 Lohest discovered two skeletons of the Neanderthal type; and 

 the elaborate account of their investigations which they have 

 published appears to me to leave little room for doubt tnat the 

 men of Spy fabricated the palaeolithic implements, and were the 

 contemporaries of the characteristic Quaternary quadrupeds, found 

 with them. The anatomical characters of the skeletons bear out 

 conclusions which are not flattering to the appearance of the 

 owners. They were short of stature but powerfully built, with 

 strong, curiously curved thigh-bones, the lower ends of which are 

 so fashioned that they must have walked with a bend at the knees. 

 Their long, depressed skulls had very strong brow-ridges ; their 

 lower jaws, of brutal depth and solidity, sloped away from the 

 teeth downward and backward, in consequence of the absence of 

 that especially characteristic feature of the higher type of man, 

 the chin prominence. Thus these skulls are not only eminently 

 " Neandertkaloid," but they supply the proof that the parts want- 

 ing in the original specimen harmonized in lowness of type with 

 the rest. 



After a very full discussion of the anatomical characters of 

 these skulls, M. Fraipont says : 



To sum up, we consider ourselves to be in a position to say that, having re- 

 gard merely to the anatomical structure of the man of Spy, he possessed a greater 

 number of pithecoid characters than any other race of mankind.J 



And, after enumerating these, he continues : 



The other and much more numerous characters of the skull, of the trunk, and 

 of the limbs seem to be all human. Between the man of Spy and an existing an- 

 thropoid ape there lies an abyss. 



* Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature, 1863, p. 155. 



f 7 raipont et Lohest, La Race humaine de Neanderthal, ou de Canstatt, en Belgique. 

 Archives de Biologie, 1886. 

 vol. xxxvni. 35 



