682 THE LAST STEPS IN THE GENEALOGY OF MAN. 



one of the most satisfactory that science has yet established, rests essen- 

 tially on a single character, the number and degree of atropy of the fin- 

 gers or toes. 



Is the form of this chosen characteristic, all ? Has not nature different 

 ways of attaining the same end, and cannot she divide her influence over 

 the make-up of the organism without making any characters particularly 

 distinctive, and even at the same time leaving present characters in 

 appearance contradictory? Mice are known entirely by their way of 

 progression, head, and general form; nevertheless, they are found under 

 different names among the aplaceutals and the placentals, among the 

 rodents and among the insectivores, terrestrial, semi-aquatic, semi-flying, 

 or flying altogether. Ii is the same with the genus squirrel; they are 

 scattered in many orders under names simply modified in certain par- 

 ticulars. There is among the marsupials a type of remarkable leaping 

 animals, which, while entirely preserving that type, are dispersed in 

 different placeutary orders, because they have acquired new characters. 



1 ask then, if the peculiar ways of the monkeys, if their habitat, which 

 is exclusively arboreal among their better defined representatives, and 

 which impresses a stamp on their entire individuality, the proportions 

 of the body, the extent and situation of the articulating surfaces, the 

 freeness of movement by means of segments one over the other, is not 

 a sufficient incitement to establish their relationship to the lemurs and 

 not at all with the ungulates. In the same way as the lemurs, which 

 live a similar life, lead to certain marsupials, so these also dwell con- 

 stantly in the trees. Between the ungulates and the monkeys I see 

 nothing in common. I can not understand an animal with hoofs walk- 

 ing on the end of the digital extremity alone, having the metatarsals 

 co-ossified, drawn out and raised, the fore limbs drawn close to the 

 body and moving almost in the same parallel plane; that is to say, 

 adapted to a measured and rythmic terrestrial locomotion, giving birth 

 to a plantigrade animal with nails, with movable fingers made so by 

 being molded upon the trees in grasping the branches, with limbs 

 endowed with the most dissimilar movements of abduction and adduc- 

 tion; whereas it does not require any eftort of imagination to conceive 

 an adaptation already commenced in that way among the lemurs and 

 having but to be continued and more specialized among the monkeys. 



Before starting on the relationship of the monkeys of the Old World 

 with man we must look into another question. We have verified an 

 intrinsic ascending series; do we find a similar one among the monkeys 

 of the New World 1 



Two stages of evolution appear at the start, one that relates to the 

 tailed or ordinary monkeys, and the other which takes in the four 

 catarrhine monkeys without tails or anthropoids. The latter show two 

 degrees, the one for the gorilla, the chimpanzee, and the orang; the 

 other for the gibbon, which is the transition shown between them and 

 the tailless monkeys, more particularly the semnopitheci. With the 



