PITHECANTHROPUS ERECTUS— A BRIEF 

 REVIEW OF HUMAN FOSSIL REMAINS. 



i. INTRODUCTORY. 



WHEN Darwin published, in 1871, The Descent of 

 Man, the impression was general that he had 

 solved and settled the genealogy of Man. Our modest 

 master, however, made no such pretension ; he claimed no 

 more than to have enunciated Man's descent as a problem, 

 and to have brought it within the arena of practical science 

 for a solution. Within that arena the problem still re- 

 mains. In 1895 no more is known of how the histories of 

 man, the gorilla, the chimpanzee, the orang and the gibbon, 

 twined together in the past than in 1871. At that time it 

 was thought that a close study of the animals themselves 

 would reveal their histories. Embryology was expected to 

 yield a great deal. The embryo, it was believed, re- 

 capitulated its own history as it unfolded itself, but the 

 good deal we know of the human embryo, and the very 

 little we know r of the simian, have taken that hope from 

 us. Vestigial structures, also, were regarded as a kind of 

 genealogical finger-posts, but their indication has proved 

 to be so indefinite as to suggest that they are rather 

 "weather-cocks" to the wind of many theories. Evidence 

 of the line of descent, yielded by anatomical structure, is of 

 a general nature only. Even were we in a position to say 

 that Man and this animal have 60 per cent., and that Man 

 and that animal have 70 per cent., of characters in common — 

 a position we have not nearly attained — we were no nearer 

 the solution of his descent. All that such knowledge 

 permits us to say is that man is a primate of the Primates, 

 a catarrhine of the Catarrhini. But the strong hope 

 remains that one source of certain evidence is left us. We 

 hope that, as the primate stock broke up in the past, and 

 came struggling into the various human and anthropoid 

 forms of to-day, Time turned down some stray specimens 

 in his geological pages, and thus preserved their histories in 



