606 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1914. 
and turn it about with his tongue, selecting the kernel! and rejecting 
every fragment of shell. This ability, common among all the pri- 
mates to sort food with the tongue, and with its aid to eschew unac- 
ceptable morsels, is strikingly absent in the case of most animals. 
Anyone can assure himself of this on seeing a dog try to get rid of 
some small unpalatable object. Animals, such as cattle, and espe- 
cially camels and giraffes, which are liable to get dangerous thorns 
into their mouths, depend upon a most elaborate arrangement of the 
long papille lining their cheeks, so that by a simple backward and 
forward movement of the tongue such things are at length extruded. 
There seems little doubt but that it is this sorting machinery of 
the tongue in the lower Primates which has been seized upon and 
greatly elaborated for the new and wondrous mechanism of articulate 
speech. 
Before going further it may be as well to clear up another point 
which seems to have puzzled some of my audience when I was lec- 
turing at Birmingham. The question was asked me, ‘‘How is a 
parrot able to talk if he has no chin?” An equally pertinent ques- 
tion would be, ‘‘How is a phonograph able to talk when it possesses 
no chin?”’ <A parrot has deep down behind its breastbone a mar- 
velously elaborate and versatile sound-producing apparatus, almost 
as different from any possessed by ourselves as is the mechanism of 
a phonograph. When man began to speak, he had to make use of 
raw material, which was there already, to build up his talking 
machinery. That the parrot and the phonograph can speak, merely 
proves that there are other ways of doing it; but the only question 
which we here have to discuss is how man did it himself with such 
means as were at his disposal. 
When we come to examine the difference between prehistoric man 
and modern savages we find the same order of structural change in 
the mandible still going on, tending to the greater efficiency of the 
genio-glossus muscle for speaking purposes. When this fanike group 
of muscular fibers came out of a deep pit, such as is seen in the 
illustration of the jaws of the lower monkeys, the fibers were obvi- 
ously hampered by being bunched and huddled together. (See fig. 
63.) As the jaw became tilted forward, giving more engine room 
beneath the tongue, the need for the pit became less, and it becomes 
shallower and shallower until we find it a mere depression, as in the 
Siamang gibbon. (See fig. 12.) These changes are plainly shown 
in the series of plaster casts of which photographs are reproduced in 
figures 9 to 18. First of all is a fossil lemur, in which the jaw still 
retains its generalized character, but is beginning to show depressions 
as the genial pit makes its appearance; then one has apes like the 
baboons, macaques, or colobus monkeys, with an exceedingly deep 
pit or depression. Next come anthropoids, in which the lower edge 
