ART. 1. PRIMATES OF THE FORT UNION GIDLEY. 19 



countered in attempting to work out their relationships, Osborn 

 cleared up much of this confusion, and laid the foundation for all 

 systematic work on the Notharctus group which followed. Since 

 the time of Osborn's revision, aided by the fine collections of better 

 material, including skull and skeletal portions obtained by various 

 expeditions of the American Museum of Natural History, the system- 

 atic development of the group has been wonderfully extended. The 

 later researches, especially of Osborn, Wortman, Matthew, Gregory, 

 and Granger in America, and Filhol, Schlosser, and Stehlin in Europe, 

 have given a very comprehensive knowledge of the known groups of 

 Eocene Primates, although there is still wide disagreement among 

 students of the problem regarding their exact systematic position 

 and the relationships they hold to the modern members of the order. 



It is not within the scope of the present communication to enter 

 into a detailed examination of all the wider aspects of these contro- 

 versies. However, the foregoing studies of this newly discovered 

 older Primate fauna, besides contributing to our knowledge of the 

 Eocene groups to which they are related, seem also to throw added 

 light on the more interesting problem of the origin of the Primates, 

 and it is their bearing on this particular phase of the subject which 

 seems important to discuss here. 



Wortman went deeply into the study of these early forms, the 

 results of his research, which was b^sed in part on material of the 

 Marsh collection at Yale University, being published in a series of 

 articles under the subheading " Part II, Primates," in the American 

 Fournal of Science (vols. 15 to 17, 1903-1904). He there set forth and 

 ably upheld the view that most at least of the known Eocene Pri- 

 mates are not Lemurs but true Anthropoids, and in defending this 

 ground, proposed a new classification and arrangement of the greater 

 groups of the order," defining them to include the known extinct 

 forms with the living species. In this rearrangement the Eocene 

 genera Adapis, NotJiarctus, and Limnotherium (Adapidae), and the 

 Hemiacodon-Washalcius group (Tarsiidae of Matthew in part) are in- 

 cluded with the " Cebidae, Cercopithecidae, Simiidae, and Homini- 

 dae" under the "Neopithecini," a major group of the Anthropoidea, 

 while the AnaptomorpJius ( = Tetonius) group was included with the 

 living genus Tarsius under the " Paleopithecini " of this suborder. 



A few years later, Gregory ^^ likewise published a comprehensive 

 restudy of the early Primates, based on extensive researches of both 

 living and extinct forms of the order. In these treatises Gregory 

 vigorously opposed Wortman's ideas of classification and phylogenies, 

 taking the more generally accepted view that all the known Eocene 



» Amer. Journ. Sci., ser. 4, vol. 15, 1903, pp. 411-414. 



"Bull. Geol. Soc. Amer., vol. 26, 1915, pp. 419-442; Bull. Amer. Mus. Nat. Hist., vol. 35, art. 19, 1916^ 

 pp. 239-355; Mem. Amer. Mus. Nat. Hist., ne>v ser., vol 3, pt. 2, 1920, pp. 49-241. 



