THE MISSING LINK 155 



to tell us? The entire foundation for this fanciful 

 imposition upon the simplicity of pupils, the ig- 

 norance of the unlettered and the credulity of the 

 schools consists in the upper portion of a skull, 

 two molar teeth and a thigh bone found scattered 

 forty-six feet apart in an old river bed in Java. 

 It is not even known whether these scattered 

 relics belonged to the same individual. It is quite 

 certain in fact that they did not. In 1891 

 one molar tooth was found, and later at a dis- 

 tance of about three feet, a fragment of a skull. 

 The following year, after laborious researches in 

 the same vicinity, the thigh bone was discovered 

 at a distance of about fifty feet from the former 

 location and nine feet from this bone the second 

 molar tooth lay embedded. 



When Dubois, who had made the discovery, 

 read his paper before the Congress of Zoologists 

 at Ley den, in 1895, the famous scientist Virchow, 

 who presided, commented upon the speaker's in- 

 genuity, but concluded that it was impossible to 

 say whether the fragments belonged to one indi- 

 vidual or to more, and whether they were simian 

 or human. The skull itself he pronounced to be 

 simply that of an ape. No other bones were 

 found in that locality in spite of a five years' 

 search, and no one can tell whence these may 

 have been washed into the river bed. Virchow 

 later confirmed his opinion that the skull was that 



