88 THE RIDDLE OF THE UNIVERSE. 



But the most important of all the recent palseonto- 

 logical discoveries which have served to elucidate the 

 origin of the placentals relate to our own stem, the 

 legion of primates. Formerly fossil remains of the 

 primates were very scarce. Even Cuvier, the great 

 founder of palaeontology, maintained until his last 

 day (1832) that there were no fossilised primates ; 

 he had himself, it is true, described the skull of an 

 Eocene prosimia {adapis), but he had wrongly classed 

 it with the ungulata. However, during the last 

 twenty years a fair number of well-preserved 

 fossilised skeletons of prosimiae and simiae have 

 been discovered ; in them we find all the chief 

 intermediate members, which complete the connecting 

 chain of ancestors from the oldest prosimiae to man. 



The most famous and most interesting of these 

 discoveries is the fossil ape-man of Java, the much- 

 talked of pithecanthropus erectus, found by a Dutch 

 military doctor, Eugen Dubois, in 1894. It is in 

 truth the much-sought "missing link," supposed to 

 be wanting in the chain of primates, which stretches 

 unbroken from the lowest catarrhinae to the highest- 

 developed man. I have dealt exhaustively with the 

 significance of this discovery in the paper which I 

 read on August 26th, 1898, at the Fourth Inter- 

 national Zoological Congress at Cambridge. 1 The 

 palaeontologist, who knows the conditions of the 

 formation and preservation of fossils, will think the 

 discovery of this pithecanthropus an unusually lucky 

 accident. The apes, being arboreal, seldom came 

 into the circumstances (unless they happened to fall 

 into the water) which would secure the preservation 



1 Vide the translation of Dr. Hans Gadow : The Last Link. (A. 

 and C. Black.) 



