LEMURS, MONKEYS, AND MAN 367 



this transition from lemur to monkey has been found by 

 Dr. Forsyth Major in the early Tertiary strata of Madagascar, 

 and named by him Nesopithecus. Although this creature is 

 specialised as regards the dentition of the lower jaw, it stands 

 very near the transitional type between the lemur and the 

 monkey. It may be supposed that this early type of South 

 American monkey first developed in and spread over Tropical 

 Africa, and passed thence (driven out, possibly, before the more 

 highly-developed, narrow-nosed family, the Catarrhines) across 

 the land bridge which once connected West Africa with Venezuela, 

 and so reached South America. 



In previous chapters of this book the former extension of the 

 Antarctic Continent has been dwelt on, and it has been shown that 

 there are good reasons to suppose that it connected South America 

 with New Zealand and Australia, but not with South Africa. 

 At the same time there are equally good reasons to postulate 

 the existence in early Tertiary times of a land bridge connecting 

 Venezuela and Brazil with Western Africa ; and it has therefore 

 been argued that the resemblances between the Madagascar (as 

 representing the primitive African) fauna and the South American 

 and Australian vertebrates and land invertebrates may be explained 

 by their migration to and from South America and Africa by 

 means of this Equatorial land bridge, and not by the connection 

 between the Cape Peninsula and Antarctica, a connection which 

 is rendered problematical by the great depths of the intervening 

 sea. In this manner the South American Continent became 

 peopled with those early representatives of the sub-order Simice — 

 the American monkeys. It would therefore seem as though the 

 Primates, having originated in North America (at that time 

 completely cut off from the southern part of the hemisphere), 

 travelled first to Europe, then to Africa, and thence penetrated 

 South America in the form of the Platyrrhine monkeys. By this 

 time the land connection through Antarctica between South 



their broad noses, the number of their molar and premolar teeth (they 

 always have three pairs of premolars instead of the two found in other 

 monkeys and in man), and in some other particulars. 



