424 



NATURE 



[August i, 191 8 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 



[The Editor does not hold himself responsible for 

 opinions expressed by his correspondents. Neither 

 can he undertake to return, or to correspond with 

 the writers of, rejected manuscripts intended for 

 this or any other part of Nature. No notice is 

 taken of anonymous communications.'] 



The Problem of Man's Ancestry. 



Having read Prof. Wood-Jones's booklet, "The 

 Problem of Man's Ancestry," reviewed in Nature of 

 June 27, p. 322, it seems to me that Prof. Wood- 

 Jones's assertion that man, instead of being the 

 descendant of the apes, may be looked on as their 

 ancestor contrasts with what the author himself writes 

 on the premaxillary bone (p. 36). If man, who is the 

 forerunner, has lost the individuality of the premaxil- 

 lary element (which is not present in the human 

 embryo, according to the author), how is it that it is 

 found in the apes? It cannot be a new acquisition, 

 because the premaxillary bone is already found in 

 primitive mammals. Therefore apes have this primi- 

 tive characteristic instead of man. 



As to the judgment of the late Hermann Klaatsch 

 that "man and his ancestors were never quadrupeds 

 as the dog or the elephant or the horse," I think it 

 was superfluous already when written by Klaatsch, as 

 no one then accepted such a view; it is, therefore, not 

 worth Prof. Wood-Jones's while to repeat it, especially 

 as this judgment does not at all say that man was 

 not an ape. 



Klaatsch only said that the anthropoids were at- 

 tempts which had failed, and that man was the suc- 

 cessful attempt (this, too, is a fairly banal idea) ; but 

 he never denied the aflfinity between man and the 

 Simiidae. On the contrary, his last scientific opinion 

 was an exaggeration of such an aflfinity, the so-called 

 " pao-anthropoid theory," already criticised bv Prof. 

 Arthur Keith and myself. 



V. GlUFFRIDA-RuGGEKl. 



Istituto di Antropologia, R. University, 

 Napoli, July 14. 



I. THINK that Prof. Giuffrida-Ruggeri has somewhat 

 misunderstood my meaning, for naturally I have never 

 asserted that the premaxillary element is not pi:esent 

 in the human embryo. All I , have ever ventured to 

 state is that "it has ceased to exist as a separate entity 

 on the human face," and that this state of affairs 

 is brought about remarkably early in the embryo. 

 This I have alluded to as "a human specific charac- 

 ter,"^ a specialisation from that primitive mammalian 

 condition which is still retained in all the rest of the 

 Simiidas, and I see nothing illogical in assuming that 

 the mammal which possesses this specialisation is yet 

 more akin to the primitive mammalian condition than 

 are those anim'als which, lacking this particular 

 character, exhibit a host of other features which we 

 know to be departures from the primitive mammalian 

 plan. It is upon a summation of characters that we 

 must judge of the animal's zoological position, and 

 my point is that, when such a complete survey is 

 made, the balance of primitive mammalian features 

 is found in the body of man, and not in the body of 

 the monkey. I need scarcely say that I have never 

 "denied the affinity between man and the Simiidae," but 

 I have insisted upon a proper recognition of the dififer- 

 ences between the anatomical structure of man and 

 the Simiidae. 



Two classes of criticism have been levelled against 

 my very humble pamphlet. The one, typified bv the 

 review in Nature, names it and condemns it as 

 NO. 2544, VOL. lOl] 



"a new hypothesis as to man's origin"; the other,, 

 on the lines of Prof. Giuftrida-Ruggeri's last para- 

 graph, assumes that it has all been so long generally 

 accepted that it is "not worth while to repeat it." 

 Since these two types of criticism tend to neutralise 

 each other, I have hitherto refrained from discussion ; 

 but if Prof. Giuffrida-Ruggeri imagines that no one 

 believed, even when Klaatsch wrote, that man's 

 ancestors were pronogrades, he should read the review 

 in Man (No. 71, 1916), written by a well-known com- 

 parative anatomist, who " is, and has long been, con- 

 vinced of the pronograde ancestry of man." 



F. WoOD-JONES. 



LICE AND DISEASE. 



TYPHUS fever and the relapsing fever of 

 North Africai are now both known to be 

 transmitted from man to man by Pediculus 

 humanus, and for this reason have been in past 

 centuries perhaps the two most characteristic 

 epidemic diseases of overcrowding- and poverty, 

 and during wars have attacked beleaguered 

 cities in particular. A third disease, known in 

 the British Army as trench fever, has recently 

 been definitely proved to be conveyed by lice. In 

 Germany this same disease is called Febris vol- 

 hynica or Fehris quintana. The especial associa- 

 tion of the disease with life in the trenches was. 

 early noticed, and helped to bring lice under 

 suspicion. 



The German Army first recognised the disease 

 in Volhynia, a region of South-West Russia; but 

 it is said to have been previously known to Polish, 

 doctors. Cases of the disease were not noted 

 in Mesopotamia, Egypt, or the Mediterra- 

 nean area until the close of 1916. The disease is 

 thought to have been introduced into Greece by 

 chronic cases which arrived at Salonika from 

 France in the winter of 1916-17. 



The first published clinical account of the 

 disease was by Major J. H. P. Graham in 

 September, 191 5, and since then much has been 

 written on the subject. The first published at- 

 tempt to investigate the pathology of trench 

 fever was that by McNee, Renshaw, and Brunt. 

 Two varieties of the disease were described by 

 these authors, who showed, by a series of obser- 

 vations on volunteers, that it could be trans- 

 mitted from man to man by taking blood from a 

 patient during, or immediately after, an attack 

 of the fever, and injecting it into a healthy man. 

 The red-blood corpuscles especially were suspected 

 of harbouring a causative micro-organism, but 

 microscopical examination did not result in the 

 discovery of a parasite. The virus was not con- 

 veyed by filtered serum or plasma. 



Trench fever is still responsible for a very large 

 share of the sickness in the Expeditionary Forces 

 in France. Our knowledge of this disease has 

 been summed up in a paper read before the Society 

 of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene on May 17 last 

 by Major Byam, who has had exceptional oppor- 

 tunities of studying cases at the New End Military 

 Hospital, Hampstead. 



Three chief obstacles to the investigation of the 



