S20 SCIENTIFIC RECORD FOR 1885. 



made iu the Quaternary gravels of Nerbaddah and Qnadav^ry lead tis 

 to siippoise even this assertion exaggerated. The law governing mam- 

 malian existence does not aj^ply to man. Independent of his animal 

 nature man i^ossesses an intelligence which enables him to contend suc- 

 cessfully with nature, even when he is in the lowest condition of social 

 and intellectual development. If man lived in the Tertiary he was cer- 

 tainly as able to defend himself against the deleterious influences re- 

 sulting from geological changes as he is to-day, against the extremes 

 of heat and cold." It also occurs to us that the pithecan ancestors of 

 man had progressed further in the faculty of invention than have any 

 inodern apes. In other words, if Tertiary apes utilized fire and chipped 

 flints, modern apes should also retain these arts. 



In the Proceedings of the United States National Museum will be 

 found a detailed description of the Chaclacayo trephined skull Irom a 

 cemetery near Lima, Peru, which is the most remarkable case of post- 

 mortem trephining reported. Eight distinct furrows were cut in order 

 to remove the section, which is nearly 2i inches in diameter. 



BIOLOGY. 



Professor Cope, in his discussion of the origin of man and the other 

 vertebrates, comes to the following conclusion : "An especial point of 

 interest in the phylogeny of man has been brought to light iu our North 

 American beds. There are some things in the structure of man and 

 his nearest relatives, the chimpanzee, orang, &c., that lead us to sus- 

 pect that they have not descended directly from true monkeys, but that 

 they have come I'rom some extinct tribe of lemurs." 



In reply to an editorial in Science (vi, 81) asserting that man is of 

 those forms whose ancestry is unknown. Dr. Theodore Gill says, " I 

 cannot but think that the data at hand are already abundant for an 

 answer, and that we can allocate his systematic relationships as well 

 as those of any other animal. It is difficult for me to understand how 

 any one acquainted with the data could reach a conclusion other than 

 that man is the derivative of a form very much like the chimpanzee 

 and gorilla, and that, could his remote ancestors be seen, they would 

 be placed not only in the same family, but in the same group with the 

 African apes." 



Th(i pelvic index is the ratio of the transverse to the conjugate diam- 

 eter of the pelvis brim expressed by integers. Dolichopellic signifies 

 a pelvis, the conjugate diameter of which is longer than the transverse, 

 or closely approaching it, above 9o; platypellic, a pelvis in which the 

 transverse diameter greatly exceeds the conjugate, below 90; mesati- 

 pellic, a pelvis in which the transverse diameter is not greatly in excess 

 of the conjugate, between 90 and 95. To the thorough discussion of 

 this characteristic Dr. Hennig devotes a monograph published in Archiv 

 filr Anthropoloyie. 



