446 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



developed in the ugliest among them. The brain of the horse, 

 nearest by virtue of its less rudimentary anterior lobe to that of 

 the Primates, is rude, notwithstanding its well-formed convolu- 

 tions, in comparison with that of the simians in general. Even 

 the skull of the monkeys has something human, and reflects the 

 interior cerebral organ. The brain has been evolved in all the 

 branches of the tree of the mammalia, and at the end of some 

 branches is elaborate in its convolutions, sometimes surpassing 

 that of man in their richness. But in only one branch, that of 

 the monkeys, does that exist from the beginning which gives 

 the brain a special value, and causes them eventually to excel, 

 whether the number of convolutions be equal or unequal. 



We are amused with the monkeys, without remarking how 

 marvelously they too are organized for their peculiar mode of 

 life. We see them sporting, grimacing, swinging from one 

 branch to another, and performing the most incredible feats of 

 real acrobats. But we do not reflect that these habits, these 

 necessities of their existence, are precisely what has given rise to 

 the organ to which man owes most, after the brain — the hand. 

 That hand, which by a curious aberration had in some of the 

 marsupials abandoned the anterior for the posterior extremity, 

 still occupies that extremity in the lemurians. In the monkeys 

 it returns to take possession of its natural place of election, there 

 to perfect itself gradually and to result in the incomparable 

 apparatus which has caused Franklin to define man as "the 

 maker of instruments." 



The brain and its accompanying type of skull, the hand and 

 its annexes the nails, are the characteristics which have pro- 

 duced the privileged situation of those animals which are cor- 

 rectly grouped together under the designation of the order of 

 Primates. With some modifications in the proportions of the 

 limbs to height and some accessory characteristics, their variants 

 give place in them to divisions ranging from the lowest up to man. 

 These divisions, whatever may be their relative value and their 

 respective distances, are five : The lemurians — the monkeys of the 

 New World, or the cebeans, from which the arctopithecans are 

 sometimes separated ; the monkeys of the Old World ; tailed mon- 

 keys or pithecans ; tailless or anthropoids ; and man. A question 

 which we had set before ourselves, and which had been much dis- 

 cussed in the Socie'te' d'Anthropologie, was whether the anthro- 

 poids of this list are nearer to the pithecan and cebean monkeys 

 or to man. Shall we place in the same group monkeys and an- 

 thropoids or anthropoids and man ? The question was then one 

 of measuring in some way the interval between these anthropoids 

 and man and comparing it with the subsequent intervals between 

 the lower monkeys. From the result came the adoption of one or 



