THE LAST STAGES IN THE GENEALOGY OF MAN. 



75 



great number of characteristics forming series, proceeding from 

 the apes to man, and passing or not passing by the anthropoids. 

 M. Vogt ends with an argument that has more weight : " The in- 

 fantile ape is more like man than the adult ape, and their differ- 

 ences, characterized by the evolution of the jaws, the cranial 

 crests, etc., become pronounced only with age " ; and, finally, " the 

 conclusion results from all these facts, that man can be placed in 

 direct generic relation neither with recent apes nor with any of 

 the known fossil apes, but that the two (man and the ape) have 

 risen from a common stock, the characteristics of which are still 

 visible in the age of youth, which is nearer to the stock than the 

 adult being." 



M. Vogt's last argument is a priori correct. Every one has 

 remarked the contrast between the skulls of the young and the 

 adult orang or gorilla. Its value rests on the admitted principle 

 of the parallelism of ontogeny and phylogeny, which is expressed 

 by saying that the forms of the young subject reproduce forms 

 that have existed in ancestors, and thereby indicate their filiation. 

 In other words, the new characteristic in progress, that which 

 should connect a species with a succeeding species, exists in the 

 adult in the highest degree, while the characteristic that belongs 

 to the ancestors exists in the infant when it is wanting in the 

 adult. As an example, we cite the pulmonary respiration of the 

 adult salamander and the branchial respiration of the young sala- 

 mander. 



But it is necessary to distinguish wdiat is produced after birth 

 and is a fact of the growth of the body, of physiological develop- 

 ment by the progress of age in the individual life, from what is an 

 ancestral resemblance dependent on the embryological and intra- 

 uterine ontogeny. In the infant man, as in the young ape, the 

 skull is rounded in every direction, uniform, and almost without 

 asperities. The temporal crests and the sagittal crest, which is 

 only the result of the elevation and lying back of the former on 

 the median line, are developed on eitlier hand with age, especially 

 in the male, and are in relation with the strength of the muscles 

 that are inserted upon them. They become considerable in the 

 apes, and form large temporal bones in the species that have a 

 considerable masticatory apparatus. 



The superciliary arches grow in man and in the apes with age, 

 and do not take so remarkable an aspect in the latter, in the an- 

 thropoids, for example, only because they have more ample front- 

 al sinuses, which is a secondary characteristic. The projection 

 of the jaws, also, becomes marked in both only with age ; the hu- 

 man infant has an orthognathous, minute face, hidden under a 

 skull forming a great ball, as in the orang; this face grows, 

 lengthens, and becomes prognathous, partly by simple augmenta- 



