THE HUMAN SIDE OF APES 

 By Samuel Jackson Holmes 



Professor oj Zoology in ',he University of California 



For some peculiar reason the animal kingdom includes 

 several kinds of creatures that are remarkably like us in a 

 great many ways. Everyone has noticed the amusing resem- 

 blances betv^een apes and men, but few are aware of the 

 numerous and close similarities between them that are 

 revealed by a thorough comparative study. Bone for bone, 

 muscle for muscle, nerve for nerve, we are remarkably 

 close counterparts of our anthropoid relatives. Even in 

 the structure of the brain, which is, perhaps, our most dis- 

 tinctive anatomical peculiarity, there is, as Prof. G. Elliot 

 Smith has remarked, no essential difference, except in degree 

 of development, between ape and man. To be sure, we have 

 a much larger brain, and the so-called association areas are 

 more extensively developed, but in brain structure we differ 

 less from the higher apes than these differ from the lower 

 members of the monkey tribe. 



Now mental development and brain development are 

 closely tied together. We stand far above the apes in the 

 development of our minds, and no one is wise enough to 

 gauge the degree of our mental superiority from a study of 

 the structure of the brain. A comparative study of brains, 

 however, would lead us to infer that the ape stands nearer 

 than any other animal to man in mental endowment. And 

 this inference is abundantly justified. Nevertheless, the gap 



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