THE DESCENT OF MAN 73 



human race, it has happened again and again that 

 connecting links between man and apes have appar 

 ently been discovered, but each time the discovery 

 has led to disappointment. The Pithecanthropus 

 erectus made a great stir. A Dutch army surgeon, 

 named Eugen Dubois, in 1891 discovered in an old 

 river-bed in Java, at a distance of several yards 

 from one another, the vault of a cranium, a femur, 

 and first one and then another molar tooth. He 

 believed that these had all belonged to one and the 

 same individual, who was neither a man nor an ape, 

 but something between the two. 



The lecturer displayed a diagram of the reconstructed 

 cranium of the Pithecanthropus. 



The discovery aroused much surprise. I remem 

 ber how at the Zoological Congress of 1895, in Leiden, 

 Eugen Dubois spoke for two hours, trying to prove 

 that this Pithecanthropus was the hitherto vainly 

 sought missing link between man and ape. During 

 the proceedings Virchow, as honorary president, 

 sat with a fixed, judicial expression. I tried to 

 make out what he thought about the paper, but 

 it was impossible. When Dubois had finished, 

 he stood up, and in the most courteous terms 

 expressed his grateful appreciation of the speaker, 

 but added, that it would not be possible to arrive 

 at any definite conclusion, until a complete skeleton 

 was found. This somewhat severe condition still re 

 mains unfulfilled, and the hopes, to which the 

 discovery had given rise, were disappointed. 



