ANATOMICAL STRUCTURE OF ANTHROPOID APES. 207 



unconscious. It is very common among the inspired 

 Arabs termed Haschascb, who, sometimes as der- 

 vishes, sometimes as poets or beast-tamers, roam 

 through the country and extend their wanderings 

 from the interior of Africa to the latticed gates of 

 Dolma Bakhtsche. To them belong also the dancing 

 mendicant monks of Islam, who display their ape- 

 like gesture in the market-places and streets of 

 Bokhara, as well as in the other chief cities of 

 Central Asia. In this case, indeed, many gestures 

 are conventional, and even adopted as the means of 

 stimulating the proposed effects, but at the same 

 time they impress us with the idea that a man under 

 such conditions of life and work involuntarily adopts 

 the gestures of anthropoids. When we see a Zikr, 

 an Islamite rite of worship, accompanied by obli- 

 gatory howls and contortions of body, we are tempted 

 to imagine ourselves in the midst of a troop of wild 

 apes. And the illusion is still stronger if the per- 

 formers in the "Zikr are black fakirs, dressed as 

 warriors. 



The peripheral nervous system of anthropoids 

 has not, up to this time, been analyzed with the 

 completeness we could wish. As far as the observa- 

 tions of Vrolik, Gratiolet, and Alix go, together with 

 my personal experience in this department, no 

 marked distinction can be established between the 

 structure of these organs in anthropoids and those of 

 the nervous system in man. 



H. von Ihering has studied the relation of the 

 nervous lumbo-sacral plexus to the vertebral column 

 of men and animals, and has come to the conclusion 



