ON SOME FOSSIL REMAINS OF MAN 



I HAVE endeavoured to show, in the preceding Essay, that 

 the ANTHROPINI, or Man Family, form a very well defined 

 group of the Primates, between which and the imme- 

 diately following Family, the CATARHINI, there is, in the 

 existing world, the same entire absence of any transitional 

 form or connecting link, as between the CATARHINI and 

 PLATYRHINI. 



It is a commonly received doctrine, however, that the 

 structural intervals between the various existing modifi- 

 cations of organic beings may be diminished, or even 

 obliterated, if we take into account the long and varied 

 succession of animals and plants which have preceded 

 these now living and which are known to us only by their 

 fossilized remains. How far this doctrine is well based, 

 how far, on the other hand, as our knowledge at present 

 stands, it is an overstatement of the real facts of the case, 

 and an exaggeration of the conclusions fairly deducible 

 from them, are points of grave importance, but into the dis- 

 cussion of which I do not, at present, propose to enter. It 

 is enough that such a view of the relations of extinct to living 

 beings has been propounded, to lead us to inquire, with 

 anxiety, how far the recent discoveries of human remains 

 in a fossil state bear out, or oppose, that view. 



I shall confine myself, in discussing this question, to those 

 fragmentary Human skulls from the caves of Engis in 

 the valley of the Meuse, in Belgium, and of the Neanderthal 

 near Diisseldorf, the geological relations of which have been 

 examined with so much care by Sir Charles Lyell ; upon 

 whose high authority I shall take it for granted, that the 

 Engis skull belonged to a contemporary of the Mammoth 

 (Elephas primigenius) and of the woolly Rhinoceros (Rhino- 

 cerus tichorhinus), with the bones of which it was found 

 associated ; and that the Neanderthal skull is of great, 

 though uncertain, antiquity. Whatever be the geological 

 age of the latter skull, I conceive it is quite safe (on the 

 ordinary principles of paleontological reasoning) to assume 



