526 THE STATURE OF MAN AT VARIOUS EPOCHS. 



gibbon, and man himself. The femur, whose form indicates adapta- 

 tion to an erect posture, reveals man; the skull, ^Yhose capacity is 

 too small for man but a little too large for an ape, reveals a superior 

 anthropoid. The remains were in a state of fossilization corre- 

 sponding to their antiquity and permitting them to be handled with- 

 out danger of breaking them. They were exhibited throughout 

 Europe and submitted to the examination of all competent anato- 

 mists — Krause, Waldeyer, Virchow, Luschan, Nehring, in Germany; 

 Milne Edwards, E. Perrier, Filhol, in France; Cuningham and 

 Turner, in England. 



At Berlin the scholars brought into prominence reasons why the 

 anthropopithecus could not be a man ; at London they showed wdiy it 

 could not be an ape. So nothing was left the transformists but the 

 conclusion that the creature, wdiich was neither a man nor an ape, 

 must be both at the same time, and that it constituted the transition 

 stage from ape to man, the " missing link " of the chain that binds 

 the human to the animal kind. E. Dubois assigned a height of 1.70 

 meters to the anthropopithecus; the estimate of M. Manouvrier is 

 somewhat less. The length of the femur permits us to attribute a 

 height of about 1.65 meters, the average height of the European, to 

 this precursor, this original ancestor of man. 



After measuring skeletons of the Tertiary epoch, as was done by 

 M. Manouvrier, it was necessary to do the same for those of the 

 Quaternary epoch. The task w^as undertaken by M. Eahon." The 

 most ancient specimen of that period is the skeleton of Neanderthal, 

 found in 1857 in a limestone cave of Neanderthal, between Diissel- 

 dorf and Elberfeld. The first measurements, made by Professor 

 Schaafhausen, showed that the relative proportions of the members 

 were those of a European of average size or a little below the average. 

 Schaafhausen determined the height to be l.GOl meters; Rahon's 

 estimate, 1.613 meters, is almost the same. 



It would be idle to give in detail similar measurements made of all 

 the hunuui bones of the Quaternary period that MM. Manouvrier and 

 Rahon had before them either in the original or in casts. They com- 

 puted the height of the man of Spy to be 1.610 meters, that of the 

 man found in the clay of Lahr 1.720 meters. The latter, as is appar- 

 ent, belonged to the group of '' tall-bodied '' men. The troglodyte of 

 Chancelade, found in the more recent strata of Quaternary soil, was 

 1.612 meters, the crushed man of Laugerie 1.669 meters. The aver- 

 age for the four cases is 1.652 meters. 



These figures would indicate but a moderate size in our distant 

 ancestors, who were contemporaries of the cave bear and chased the 



a It must be stated that tlu.- figures here given refer to the fleshly body, not to 

 the skeleton. They give the length of the corpse as it would measure if 

 stretched on the ground. Man erect and living measures 2 centimeters less. 



