74 THE PROBLEM OF EVOLUTION 



For the amusement of his audience the lecturer here 

 displayed a lantern slide on which was a grotesque figure 

 representing the Pithecanthropus as a dandy, or masher. 

 It was copied from the bill of fare at the third Zoological 

 Congress. 



The highest scientific authorities of the present 

 time have decided, with regard to the Pithecan- 

 thropus, that he was a true ape, belonging to the 

 Hylobatidse group, which in many respects 

 resembles man more closely than do certain an- 

 thropomorphic apes, although in other ways it is 

 more closely allied to the lower apes. 



Still more famous than the Pithecanthropus was 

 the so-called Neandertal man, discovered in 1850 

 or thereabouts. His cranium was found in front of 

 a cave in the Diissel valley near the Rhine. It was 

 examined repeatedly, and anthropologists expressed 

 a great variety of opinions regarding it, some taking 

 it to be part of the skull of a Mongolian Cossack. 

 Virchow even then expressed his doubts as to its 

 really possessing the antiquity ascribed to it. In 

 1901 Schwalbe examined it again, and thought that 

 he found support for the hypothesis that the owner 

 of the cranium had not been a human being, but had 

 belonged to some species standing midway between 

 ape and man. Not long after, however, in 1904, 

 the same scientist declared that the Neandertal 

 creature had not belonged to any intermediate 

 species, but was a man of some prehistoric race, 

 resembling lower animals. He named this being 



