[hill-tout] PHYLOGENY OF MAN 67 



ment and hence their more ape-Hke appearance. The same ex- 

 planation accounts for the appearance of these pithecoid characters 

 in Australian man and the other so-called primitive races. Re- 

 specting the excessive bony arches over and around the eyes, Dr. 

 Gorke and others have suggested that these are necessary in an 

 animal with a heavy jaw-bone, large molars and a retreating fore- 

 head. With such a forehead and a projecting upper-jaw the lines 

 of pressure would enter the skull case at an oblique angle. Thus a 

 development of bone in this region would give the resistance neces- 

 sary in these circumstances. 



Now these characters are not necessarily primitive as we have 

 been in the habit of supposing. Indeed they cannot be those which 

 were possessed by the common ancestor of apes and man, or they 

 would be seen in the young of both branches of the Primates, and this 

 they are not. This is a fact, I submit, which has been too much 

 disregarded in all our inquiries. Time and again the human-like 

 features in the skulls of the young anthropoids, indeed of all the young 

 of the Simiadae, have been remarked upon. It has also been pointed 

 out by some writers tha the skulls of the young Neanderthalers, as 

 exemplified in the Krapina children, are wholly wanting in the pithe- 

 coid features characteristic of the adult skulls of Mousterian man; 

 and yet the real significance of this fact seems to have escaped the 

 attention of every investigator. Let us consider a moment what 

 the absence of these features in the young of Neanderthal man and 

 of the anthropoids really signifies. And in order to rightly ap- 

 preciate the point let us view the skulls of the Krapina children and 

 the skulls of the young anthropoids in the light of that great bio- 

 genetic principle, sometimes called Baer's law. 



This, briefly expressed, signifies that the ontogeny of the indi- 

 vidual recapitulates the phylogeny of the race. In other words, 

 that the embryological development of the individual is an epitome 

 of the evolutionary course taken by the order or class to which it 

 belongs; and further^ — and this is where this law throws light upon 

 the question we are considering — that the young of any species 

 represents more truly and closely than do the adult members of that 

 species the actual ancestral type from which the species originally 

 sprang. It is true that a wider knowledge of embryological develop- 

 ment than von Baer possessed has shown us that this biogenetic 

 law was not so absolute and thorough-going as he conceived it to be; 

 and w^e can no longer say today that the ontogeny of the individual 

 recapitulates the phylogeny of the race in all its phases. It does 

 recapitulate a great number of very important phases, but it also 



