THE MISSING LINK l6l 



of the greatest authorities in their respective 

 fields. 



But what of the Neanderthal man? He was 

 constructed from an incomplete fragment of a 

 skull found in a cave of the Neanderthal, near the 

 Rhine, in 1857. Schwalbe in 1904 named him 

 the Homo primigenius. In 1901 the same author 

 had submitted the skull to a close examination 

 and quoted eleven different scientific opinions re- 

 garding it. It was held by various representative 

 authorities to be the skull of an idiot, of a Kos- 

 sack, a Celt or a German, a Dutchman or a 

 Frisian, some claiming it belonged to a still exist- 

 ing race and others to an extinct race, and some 

 regarded it simply as a freak of nature. It was 

 finally looked upon as simply the skull of some 

 ancient human race, not specifically different from 

 ourselves. 11 Even Huxley insisted that it repre- 

 sented no intermediate form. The difference of 

 cranial capacity between the Neanderthal man 

 and a present Australian negro was shown to be 

 exceedingly slight. He was in brief a true man 

 and many specimens of skulls and skeletons have 

 been found that would seem to belong to the same 

 race, i.e. the men of Le Moustier, of whom Bert- 

 ram Windle says: 



And what do we know about them? In the first place we 

 know that they were men in every sense of the word, and big- 



11 See Wasmann, op. cit., pp. 467, 476 ; Windle, op. cit. t pp. 

 148, 149- 



