MEN AND APES. 13 
SKELETON—MAN. SKELETON—GORILLA. 
jaw-bones and protruding face, put the ereature at an unappreciable distance from 
humanity, even though it is represented in an attitude as similar to that of the human 
being as the organization of the bones will permit. Any one who could fancy himself to 
be descended, however remotely, from such a being, is welcome to his ancestry. 
Contrast with the skeleton of the gorilla, that of man. Light in structure, and 
perfectly balanced on the small and delicate feet ; the slender arms, with their characteristic 
hands ; the smooth and rounded skull; the small jaw-bones and regular teeth, all show 
themselves as the framework of a being whose strength is to le in his intellect, and not 
in the mere brute power of bone and muscle. There seems to be a strange eloquence in 
form, which speaks at once to the heart in language that can only be felt, and is beyond 
the power of analysis to resolve. Thus, the contrasted shapes of these two frames speak 
more forcibly of the immeasurable distance between the two beings of which they form a 
part, than could be expressed in many pages of careful description. Strength for strength, 
the ape is many times the man’s superior, and could rend him to pieces in single combat. 
But that slender human frame can be so intellectually strengthened, that a single man 
could destroy a troop of apes, if he so desired, and without offering them the possibility 
of resistance. 
One great cause of the awkward bipedal walk of the monkey tribes, is the position of 
the orifice in the skull, through which the spinal cord enters the brain. In the human 
skull this orifice is so placed that the head is nearly equally balanced, and a considerable 
portion of the skull projects behind it; but in the lower animals, this ovifice—called the 
