VERTEBRATE PALEONTOLOGY — MATTHEW 283 



The sum of these discoveries is to impress strongly on the mind 

 the probability that our own species is but one out of several human 

 species which lived and flourished and competed one with another 

 during the Pleistocene period ; our own species, perhaps through its 

 higher social adaptability, being at last supreme, and sole survivor 

 at the present day. Yet it appears probable that through crossing 

 and intermixture some of the blood of one or more of these extinct 

 species of man still survives here and there among our own race 

 and may yet be recognizable when the application of Mendelism to 

 systematic osteology and paleontology is more fully understood and 

 applied, and also when our collections of the remains of fossil man 

 are so extensive as to admit of such applications. Whatever may be 

 the prospects of getting anywhere along this line, it is quite clearly 

 demonstrated by these recent discoveries that the problem of the 

 ancestry of our race — of the evolution of man — is in reality a much 

 more complex and difficult one than had been assumed either by the 

 exponents or opponents of evolution. It is not one missing link that 

 we have to find, but many. Each of the discoveries I have cited is a 

 " missing link " ; but we can not be satisfied with merely answering 

 the challenge of the ignorant, and each discovery serves as a spur to 

 further search. 



A remarkable recent discovery is that of a true anthropoid primate 

 in the Lower Pliocene of this country. While the single upper molar 

 which Osborn has named Hesperopithecus 34 does not prove the pre- 

 cise affinities of the animal, there is no reasonable doubt in the minds 

 of those who have studied the original specimen that it is one of the 

 higher Anthropoidea. The discovery of such a type was not wholly 

 unexpected, as the writer and Mr. H. C. Cook, in describing the 

 Snake Creek fauna in 1909, pointed out that certain badly preserved 

 teeth might perhaps be anthropoid, and that the character of the 

 associated fauna made such a discovery reasonably possible. Never- 

 theless it was not considered likely, as the formation had been dili- 

 gently and repeatedly prospected in subsequent years without success. 



FOREIGN RESEARCHES AND DISCOVERIES, MISCELLANEOUS 

 CONTRIBUTIONS 



Paleontological research in other parts of the world is much less 

 advanced than in North America and Europe, but, in addition to the 

 few discoveries already mentioned, several other important results of 

 exploration have already been secured. In the West Indies a more 

 or less systematic search for fossil vertebrates has been made by the 

 American Museum, the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and the 



84 H. F. Osborn (1922) : Amer. Mus. Novitates, no. 37. 



W. K. Gregory and Milo Hellman (1923) : Amer. Mus. Novitates, no. 53. 



