BIOLOGY AND ZOOLOGY i 37 



of knowledge was roughly as follows. It was accepted on the one hand that even the 

 lowest existing savage was much modified from any intermediate ancestor, and was truly 

 a member of the species to which the highest civilised types belong, and on the other 

 that the existing anthropoid apes were equally modified, probably in a degenerate or 

 specialised direction, from the common man-ape ancestor. Human skulls like those of 

 Neanderthal and Spy showed the existence of a race of cave-men with very low fore- 

 heads and prominent brow-ridges which in many respects were anthropoid in type, 

 differing remarkably from the modern type and resembling adult gorillas and chimpan- 

 zees. These are of no great geological antiquity. Abundant fossil remains of a very 

 much older date showed the existence, in Miocene and Pliocene times, of large creatures 

 certainly apes, but more human than existing apes, and suggesting the degeneracy of 

 the modern anthropoids. Finally Dr. Dubois's Javan discovery of Pithecanthropus 

 erectus (E. B. xxi, 665) established the existence of a still more man-like ape, or of a more 

 ape-like man than any form hitherto known. Its date was a matter of dubiety; Dr. 

 Dubois was disposed to refer it to the Pliocene; a preponderance of expert opinion placed 

 it later, in the Pleistocene. Mr. Charles Dawson has now discovered a skull that is 

 more interesting and significant as evidence for the descent of man than any hitherto 

 known. Four years ago, at Piltdown, near Fletching in Sussex, he discovered the first 

 fragment in a bed of gravel usually worked for road metal. During 1912 he and Dr. A. 

 Smith Woodward, the Keeper of Geology at the British Museum, searched the bed 

 assiduously and discovered enough fragments to build up an almost complete skull and 

 to make it possible to have an internal cast which showed something of the structure of 

 the brain. The skull had the vertical forehead of a modern man with scarcely a trace 

 of the prominent brow ridges of the cave-man, but the back of the skull and neck were 

 shaped much more like those of an ape than of any human type. The size of the brain 

 was not more than two-thirds that of a modern brain. The jaw, but for the presence of 

 two distinctively human teeth, would certainly have been referred to a chimpanzee or 

 gorilla. The skull in short was much more like that of a young chimpanzee, those of 

 cave-men being like adult chimpanzees. Dr. Woodward's inference is that the Pilt- 

 down skull proves the existence of a real intermediate form, a true link between man and 

 the ape, while the cave-men were degenerate offshoots of the ancestors of a modern stock. 

 The gravel contained mammalian teeth of Pliocene age, and primitive shaped flints of 

 the Lower Pleistocene. The unworn condition of the human remains suggests that the 

 date is Pleistocene, not Pliocene, and the association with older mammalian relics 

 accidental, but the similar staining of the human skull and the Pliocene relics is regarded 

 as evidence for the older date. 



The Preservation of Fauna and Flora. 



It has long been acknowledged that in every part of the world the existing species 

 of animals and plants are being sorely oppressed by man. Many species have become 

 extinct within recent times, and the range of nearly every species is becoming restricted. 

 It is no doubt part of a general biological process by which a dominant species, extend- 

 ing its range and becoming adapted to new and varied conditions, interferes with species 

 already in possession. But man as a dominant species has a wider range and greater 

 destructive powers than any of the lower forms. The danger of extermination presented 

 itself in the most acute form with regard to well known game animals, especially in 

 India, America and Africa, but is now being taken up on a wider basis. There is in- 

 creasing evidence of a consensus of opinion throughout the civilised world that it is a 

 duty of the present generation to preserve for the future all existing species that are not 

 positively inimical to man. The late Lord Salisbury, so long ago as 1899, took an im- 

 portant initial step by arranging a convention of the Great Powers interested in Africa 

 to consider the preservation of the " wild animals, birds and fish " of that continent. 

 The scope of the agreement arrived at was practically limited to creatures of economic 

 or of sporting value. Defining the number of each kind of game that can be killed, 

 regulating the limits of size and sex within which it is permissible to shoot, or to sell the 



