78 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



stouter than the adjoining incisors or pre-molars; and it is a well 

 known fact that the milk-teeth of children are more primitive in 

 character and their canines are more pronounced than are the teeth 

 which succeed them; just as the milk-canines of the young of the 

 anthropoids are less developed and less pronounced in character than 

 the permanent ones which follow them. We see, too, the evidence 

 that our remote human and semi-human ancestors possessed more 

 pronounced canines than ourselves in the fact that the roots of the 

 canine teeth start much lower down in the mandible and higher up 

 in the upper-jaw than any other of our teeth, than even those of the 

 molars, and this peculiarity is absolutely without rational explanation 

 unless we see in it the evidence that the canine teeth of our remote 

 ancestors, because of their more pronounced development, required 

 longer and deeper roots than the other teeth to stand the strain they 

 were subjected to by reason of their greater length. 



Human dentition has undergone many changes, is indeed still 

 undergoing more important modifications than that entailed by the 

 reduction in size and length of the canines. We are told that the time 

 is not far distant when we shall have lost our third molars, the so- 

 called wisdom teeth, altogether. Already they are taking on rudi- 

 mentary characters. They are relatively smaller than the other 

 molars and do not appear till we are well advanced in life and are 

 generally the first to decay. 



All these facts in respect to the Piltdown mandible would doubt- 

 less be admitted by the Millar school of opinion. It is the association 

 of such a lowly, pithecoid jaw with such a relatively well-developed 

 cranium that seems to overshadow and take the force from these 

 significant facts. But their conception of the cranial characters of a 

 Dawn-man is clearly the result of the bias their minds have received 

 from regarding Pithecanthropus and Neanderthal man as the type 

 of beings our earlier human and semi-human progenitors were. When 

 we dismiss from our mind any conceptions of this kind, which we 

 have seen, are wholly unwarranted from the evidence we draw from 

 the skull-forms of the young undifferentiated anthropoids and of 

 the whole Simiadae, the seemingly anomaly and the inharmony 

 between the Piltdown mandible and the Piltdown cranium will no 

 longer exist and we shall see in Eoanthropus a true and typical 

 Dawn-man. 



We have been accustomed heretofore to make all our anatomical 

 and morphological comparisons between the skulls of men and the 

 apes with the mature specimens of the latter. Such comparisons are 

 really fruitful only in disclosing to us the differences rather than the 



