112 ANIMAL LIFE AND HUMAN PROGRESS 



of the skeleton of the face there were two separate bones, 

 bearing the incisor teeth and marked off from the maxillae by 

 suture lines such as are present in monkeys. The great 

 Vesalius in 1543 showed that this facial suture line did not 

 exist in Man, although upon the palate the line which separated 

 the os incisivum from the maxillae was conspicuous. It was 

 useless for the adversaries of Vesalius to urge that though the 

 suture might be absent in the degenerated men of the time it 

 was certainly there in Galen's day. Others were ready to 

 affirm its universal absence. Camper was probably the first 

 to claim that the absence of the separation of this element 

 was a distinctly human characteristic. Blumenbach followed 

 him, and named the bone in question the intermaxillary. 

 Sir William Lawrence laid especial emphasis upon what he 

 regarded as the entire absence in Man of this bone, now gener- 

 ally known as the premaxilla, and he insisted that it separated 

 Man from all other animals. It is true that, as was shown 

 in 1699 by Edward Tyson, the suture line disappears in the 

 adult chimpanzee, and, as Daubenton showed later, in the 

 orang utan, but, nevertheless, the facial separation of the 

 premaxilla element is marked in younger specimens. 



This question of the curious isolation of Man in regard 

 to this feature bulked fairly large in the anthropological 

 literature of pre-Darwinian times. How was it regarded by 

 those who saw in the times immediately following Darwin a 

 ready transition from monkey to Man ? There is no doubt 

 as to the answer here it was ignored ; in the scramble for 

 likeness such an inconvenient point was dropped out of 

 consideration altogether. Our modern text-books of human 

 anatomy give the student remarkably little help in this 

 matter, and the question of the facial portion of the premaxilla 

 cannot be said to be thrust upon their notice. And yet some 

 attempt must be made to bridge the gap which here separates 

 Man from the monkeys. 



Since Man is regarded as the immediate descendant of the 

 anthropoid apes, the loss of the individuality of this element 

 should be recent in the story of the race and therefore late in 

 the development of the individual. It has been shouted even 



