190 THE DESCENT OF MAX. Part I. 



blances in other less important or quite unimportant 

 points. 



The greater number of naturalists who have taken 

 into consideration the whole structure of man, including 

 his mental faculties, have followed Blumenbach and 

 Cuvier, and have placed man in a separate Order, under 

 the title of the Bimana, and therefore on an equality 

 with the Orders of the Quadrumana, Carnivora, &c. 

 liecently many of our best naturalists have recurred to 

 the view first propounded by Linnaeus, so remarkable for 

 his sagacity, and have placed man in the same Order 

 with the Quadrumana, under the title of the Primates. 

 The justice of this conclusion will be admitted if, in 

 the first place, we bear in mind the remarks just 

 made on the comparatively small importance for classi- 

 fication of the great development of the brain in man ; 

 bearing, also, in mind that the strongly-marked differ- 

 ences between the skulls of man and the Quadrumana 

 (lately insisted upon by Bischoff, Aeby, and others) 

 apparently follow from their differently developed brains. 

 In the second place, we must remember that nearly all 

 the other and more important differences between man 

 and the Quadrumana are manifestly adaptive in their 

 nature, and relate chiefly to the erect position of man ; 

 such as the structure of his hand, foot, and pelvis, the 

 curvature of his spine, and the position of his head. 

 The family of seals offers a good illustration of the 

 small importance of adaptive characters for classification. 

 These animals differ from all other Carnivora in the 

 form of their bodies and in the structure of their limbs, 

 far more than does man from the higher apes : yet in 

 every system, from that of Cuvier to the most recent 

 one by Mr. Flower, 4 seals are ranked as a mere familv 



4 ' Proc. Zoolog. Soc' 1869, p. 4. 



