CHAPTER XXVI 

 FROM APE TO MAN 



THE recent discoveries of the actual bones of very early 

 races of man raise again a general interest in the 

 inquiry as to what are the actual differences of structure 

 between men and apes, and what were probably the 

 steps by which, as the result of " survival of the fittest," 

 some early man-like apes became ape-like men. The 

 question also arises as to how long ago the transition 

 actually took place, and whether it was a very gradual or a 

 rapid one. We are to-day in possession of some important 

 facts bearing upon this inquiry which were unknown to 

 Huxley when he wrote his ever-memorable essay on 

 " Man's Place in Nature," and triumphantly closed the 

 controversy between himself and Sir Richard Owen. 

 That was nearly fifty years ago. 



Owen had maintained that the structural difference 

 between man and the highest apes was so great that 

 it could only be rightly expressed by placing man in a 

 separate sub-class of the class " Mammalia " — the hairy 

 vertebrate animals which have warm blood and suckle 

 their young. He pointed chiefly to the large size of the 

 brain in man, the existence on each side of its central 

 cavity of a little internal swelling called the " hippocampus 

 minor," in the fanciful language of anatomists, and of 



the overlapping (within the skull) of the cerebellum by 



236 



