A Transitional Form between Man and the Apes. 5 
found in the same stratum at Trinil. Their colour is chocolate-brown ; they are 
harder than marble, and very heavy. The weight of the femur is not less than 
one ke., 7.e. more than double the weight of a recent human femur of the same 
dimensions. 
Sir William Turner supposed that the skull-cap showed signs of rubbing or 
injury, the cause of which should be that, contrary to the femur, it had been 
brought down with alluvia by the current of a tropical river. But the 
irregularities on the surface of the skull-cap, which the author of a criticism 
in ‘Natural Science” ascribes to disease, were brought about in the place 
of deposit only, as is proved by the fact that many other bones dug up in the 
neighbourhood of the cranium show the same signs, caused by the acidulous 
water at that place impregnating the rocks. All bones had been corroded more 
or less by it here. 
A doubt whether the four remains were once organically connected is certainly 
comprehensible, and was pronounced from different sides. Nevertheless, it seems 
to me that this doubt is hardly allowable, on account of the short distance of the 
places of discovery from one another, for a distance of 15 metres is so small that 
as an argument against the supposition that the bones belonged to the same skeleton, 
it cannot be considered as of more importance than if the bones had been found in 
contact with one another. I often found bones from the self-same skeleton, and 
even fragments of one bone at corresponding distances. I dare say that every 
paleontologist who has made any excavations for fossil vertebrate remains has had 
the same experience. I never found in one place anything like a complete skeleton, 
and, as certainly the bones once belonged all to complete skeletons, the bones must 
have been all dispersed. I have good reason to think that the animals perished 
in volcanic catastrophies, and that their corpses were brought down in tke 
current of a large Pliocene river. Before, then, the bones were definitely 
deposited and buried in the old alluvia, they must generally have been separated 
through the rotting of the flesh, and torn the one from the other, and dragged 
away with the adhering flesh by crocodiles. Many remains of these preying 
water-reptiles, and also the traces of their teeth in spongy parts of bones, were 
found. So this argument against the assumption that the femur ascribed by 
me to the Pithecanthropus belonged to the same skeleton as the skull-cap, 
fails. 
Seemingly as a better contra-argument it has repeatedly been said that the 
result of their anatomical analysis is opposed to that assumption. 
In refuting these objections I wish first to make a general remark. Apart from 
all disagreement in the interpretation of each separate piece, the savants, who 
have expressed their opinions on them, all agree in their being in a high degree 
human-like or anthropoid. The skull-cap is by some attributed to a Man, by 
