i 4 2 APES, MONKEYS, AND LEMURS 



our knowledge of the geology of the greater part of that continent is of the most 

 limited nature. We must, indeed, with our present knowledge, travel to the 

 extreme north of India before we obtain evidence of fossil baboons belonging to a 

 period antecedent to that during which man has existed on the globe. And it is 

 in the sandstones forming the outer flanks of the mighty Himalayas, to which we 

 have previously alluded as containing the remains of the extinct Indian chimpanzee 

 and orang, that those of the fossil baboons occur. These rocks, as we have else- 

 where stated, belong to the lower part of that division of the Tertiary period which 

 geologists designate the Pliocene. The remains of the Pliocene Indian baboons 

 are, like those of all the Primates, extremely few, yet they are amply sufficient to 

 prove the existence in that country of two distinct species. Both of these appear 

 to have been closely allied to some of the longer-tailed African species ; and we may 

 therefore conclude that these Indian species were allied to the sacred baboon or 

 the chacma. There is, moreover, evidence that baboons continued to exist in 

 India to either the early human or Pleistocene period, since a single tooth has been 

 obtained from deposits in a cavern in Madras which has likewise yielded remains 

 of man. 



We have, therefore, decisive proof that at a former epoch of the earth's history 

 such an assembly of Primates was gathered together on the plains of India at a 

 time when the Himalayas did not exist, as has been seen nowhere else beyond the 

 walls of a menagerie. Side by side with langurs and macaques closely resembling 

 those now found in that region, were chimpanzees and baboons as nearly related to 

 those of modern Africa ; while the extinct Indian orang recalls the existing species 

 of Borneo and Sumatra. India, therefore, in the Pliocene period, seems to have 

 been the central point whence the main groups of Old World Primates dispersed 

 themselves to their far distant homes. 



The generalized character, and the large size of the baboons, have suggested, 

 that it is to them we should look as the original ancestral stock from which the 

 Man-like Apes took their rise. There is, however, found in the rocks of the 

 Miocene period (the one immediately antedating the Pliocene) of Europe, a baboon- 

 like ape known as the mountain ape ( Oreopithecus) , which combines to a certain 

 extent the features now characteristic of the Man-like Apes and the baboons. It is 

 this creature, therefore, which we should rather be justified in regarding as the 

 ancestral stock of the Man-like Apes ; the baboons being survivors from a still 

 older stock, from which the mountain ape was itself derived. 



Whether the relationship which must once have existed between the baboons 

 and the inferior orders of Mammals will ever be revealed to us, is a question which 

 time alone can decide. 



