596 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



man, and everybody knows about him. Moreover, he hved in 

 Asia, which is traditionally believed to be the scene of human 

 origins. But Dryopithecus and Propliopithecus are called apes, 

 and few have ever heard of them, though Propliopithecus is 

 one of the half-dozen most significant mammalian fossils ever 

 brought to light. It is perhaps usually known, somewhat 

 vaguely, that behind Pithecanthropus, in the jungles of Miocene 

 Europe and Asia, there existed a number of great apes, of whom 

 our gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangs are a sparse remnant. 

 They lived there along with the teeming population of mastodons, 

 rhinoceroses, antelopes, three-toed horses, sabre-toothed tigers, 

 and the rest. They were a part of that amazing abundance of 

 mammalian life which bursts upon us suddenly in the Eocene, 

 and which suffered such a grievous impoverishment in the 

 Pleistocene. And the origin and history of these Miocene apes 

 are merely regarded as a part of that uncharted ocean of mam- 

 malian evolution on to which the anthropologist refrains from 

 venturing. 



And this attitude is not altogether illogical. An anthro- 

 pologist may be excused for saying that a marmoset is not a man, 

 and is therefore not his job. The line must be drawn some- 

 where ; and, since Pithecanthropus is the first of the known 

 Hominidse, it is appropriate enough that " prehistory " should 

 begin with him. But the geological history of the order 

 Primates is the immediate background of prehistoric anthro- 

 pology. And it is highly important to have this background 

 as clear as possible. The anthropologist, as such, may not be 

 concerned with it. But it is probably due to this general dis- 

 regard of the subject that a recent work on prehistoric man, 

 otherwise fairly accurate, begins with a wholly imaginary story 

 of the doings of Eocene apes, without any reference to the 

 known facts of palaeontology. And the Hominidae are ad- 

 mittedly very closely related to the other Primates, especially 

 closely — most of us think — to the great apes and Old-World 

 monkeys. And hence the geological study of the Primates is 

 the necessary and logical link between mammalian palaeonto- 

 logy as a whole and the special and narrow subject of prehistoric 

 anthropology. 



And the geological history of the Primates is perhaps the 

 more interesting in that it is far from being a simple and straight- 

 forward story, such as that of some other mammalian orders, for 

 instance the Carnivora or the Perissodactyla. I do not mean 

 that, when studied in detail, the history of any order is simple, 

 or is anything but highly complex and puzzling. On the con- 

 trary, in the case of the Carnivora, there exist some very pretty 

 problems, particularly in regard to the Ursidas and Viverridae. 

 But the appearance and subsequent history of the Carnivora 



