THE MISSING LINK 157 



that here indeed has been found the earliest speci- 

 men of the missing link. 2 



Regarding the skull alone of this specimen a 

 scientific writer offers a list of twenty leading 

 opinions. Of these "authorities" seven pro- 

 nounced it to be human, seven believed it to be 

 transitional, and six held with Virchow that it was 

 simply the pate of an ape. 3 It may be considered 

 sufficiently certain that the skull belonged to an 

 ape of great size, which will adequately account 

 for the brain capacity. Hertwig says: "The 

 opinion that is most probably correct is that the 

 fragments belonged to an anthropomorphic ape 

 of extraordinary size and an enormous cranial 

 capacity." 4 It is needless to quote further de- 

 tails where we are plainly in a land of guesses and 

 surmises. The evolutionary bias alone suggested 

 the idea that here might have been found an in- 

 termediary form. Evidence there is none. 



Neither, finally, is there any evidence whatso- 

 ever for placing these remnants in the Tertiary 

 period, and Branco in 1908 assigned them to 

 about the middle of the Pleistocene epoch. This 

 makes them contemporaneous with man, and com- 

 pletely destroys the entire hypothesis. 



But evolutionary hypotheses must be sustained 



2 On this subject see Windle, "A Century of Scientific 

 Thought," pp. 155, 157 and pp. 185, 196; also Wasmann, 

 "Modern Biology," pp. 465, 467. 



3 Dr. Munro, "Palaeolithic Man," p. 190. 



* Richard Hertwig, "Lehrbuch der Zoologie" sixth edition; 

 Wasmann, p. 466. 



