452 
DARWINISM 
CHAP. 
man are very numerous and exceedingly complex, sometimes 
one species, sometimes another agreeing most nearly with 
ourselves, thus presenting a tangled web of affinities which it 
is very difficult to unravel. Estimated by the skeleton alone, 
the chimpanzee and gorilla seem nearer to man than the 
orang, which last is also inferior as presenting certain aberra¬ 
tions in the muscles. In the form of the ear the gorilla is 
more human than any other ape, while in the tongue the 
orang is the more man-like. In the stomach and liver the 
gibbons approach nearest to man, then come the orang and 
chimpanzee, while the gorilla has a degraded liver more 
resembling that of the lower monkeys and baboons. 
The Brains of Man and Apes. 
We come now to that part of his organisation in which 
man is so much higher than all the lower animals — the brain ; 
and here, Mr. Mivart informs us, the orang stands highest 
in rank. The height of the orang’s cerebrum in front is 
greater in proportion than in either the chimpanzee or the 
gorilla. “On comparing the brain of man with the brains of 
the orang, chimpanzee, and baboon, we find a successive 
decrease in the frontal lobe, and a successive and very great 
increase in the relative size of the occipital lobe. Con¬ 
comitantly with this increase and decrease, certain folds of 
brain substance, called ‘bridging convolutions,’ which in man 
are conspicuously interposed between the parietal and 
occipital lobes, seem as utterly to disappear in the chim¬ 
panzee, as they do in the baboon. In the orang, however, 
though much reduced, they are still to be distinguished. . . . 
The actual and absolute mass of the brain is, however, slightly 
greater in the chimpanzee than in the orang, as is the relative 
vertical extent of the middle part of the cerebrum, although, 
as already stated, the frontal portion is higher in the orang; 
while, according to M. Gratiolet, the gorilla is not only 
inferior to the orang in cerebral development, but even to his 
smaller African congener, the chimpanzee.” 1 
On the whole, then, we find that no one of the great apes 
can be positively asserted to be nearest to man in structure. 
Each of them approaches him in certain characteristics, while 
1 Man and A joes, pp. 138, 144. 
