5H THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Now, that is pleasant reading for me, because, in 1863, 1 com- 

 mitted myself to the assertion that the Neanderthal skull was " the 

 most pithecoid of human crania yet discovered/' yet that " in no 

 sense can the Neanderthal bones be regarded as the remains of a 

 human being intermediate between men and apes/' * and that 

 "the fossil remains of man hitherto discovered do not seem to 

 me to take us appreciably nearer to that lower pithecoid form, 

 by the modification of which he has, probably, become what 

 he is." f 



As the evidence stood seven and twenty years ago, in fact, it 

 would have been imprudent to assume that the Neanderthal skull 

 was anything but a case of sporadic reversion. But, in my anx- 

 iety not to overstate my case, I understated it. The Neander- 

 thaloid race is " appreciably nearer," though the approximation 

 is but slight. In the words of M. Fraipont : 



The distance which separates the man of Spy from the modern anthropoid ape 

 is undoubtedly enormous ; between the man of Spy and the Dryopithecus it is a 

 little less. But we must be permitted to point out that, if the man of the later 

 Quaternary age is the stock whence existing races have sprung, he has traveled a 

 very great way. 



From the data now obtained, it is permissible to believe that we shall be able 

 to pursue the ancestral type of men and the anthropoid apes still further, perhaps 

 as far as the Eocene and even beyond.f 



These conclusions hold good, whatever the age of the men of 

 Spy ; but they possess a peculiar interest if we admit, as I think 

 on the evidence must be admitted, that these human fossils are 

 of Pleistocene age. For, after all due limitations, they give us 

 some, however dim, insight into the rate of evolution of the human 

 species, and indicate that it has not taken place at a much faster 

 or slower pace than that of other mammalia. And, if that is so, we 

 are warranted in the supposition that the genus homo, if not the 

 species which the courtesy or the irony of naturalists has dubbed 

 sapiens, was represented in Pliocene, or even in Miocene times. 

 But I do not know by what osteological peculiarities it could be 

 determined whether the Pliocene or Miocene man was sufficiently 

 sapient to speak or not ; # and whether, or not, he answered to the 



* Man's Place in Nature, pp. 156, 157. 

 f Ibid., p. 159. 



X " Where, then, must we look for primeval man ? Was the oldest Homo sapiens Plio- 

 cene or Miocene, or yet more ancient ? In still older strata do the fossilized bones of an ape 

 more anthropoid or a man more pithecoid than any yet known await the researches of some 

 unborn paleontologist?" (Man's Place in Nature, p. 150.) 



* I am perplexed by the importance attached by some to the presence or absence of 

 the so-called " genial " elevations. Does any one suppose that the existence of the genio- 

 hyo-glossus muscle, which plays so large a part in the movements of the tongue, depends 

 on that of these elevations ? 



