28 THE HUMAN SPECIES 



Cebus genus. In his opinion the Cebidae are descended from 

 Prosimiae, or Lemuridae which migrated from North to South 

 America. Briefly put, Schlosser's theory is as follows : The 

 anthropoids and man are the advanced descendants of Platyr- 

 rhines which underwent transformation during the Tertiary 

 Period. 



One grave objection to the theory is that up to the present 

 no anthropomorphous fossils have been discovered in South 

 America ! 



Quite recently Rhumbler, in tracing man's descent from 

 earlier anthropoids, 1 followed closely Darwin and Haeckel, 

 and laid stress on the number of morphological characters 

 possessed by man in common with the anthropoids which are 

 absent in other mammalia. In his opinion it is impossible 

 that the human foot, one of the most eminently distinctive 

 characters of man, can have been evolved from the prehen- 

 sile foot through climbing large trees, as suggested by Klaatsch. 

 Rhumbler considers it far more probable that during the 

 transition to the erect attitude the opposable first toe of the 

 prehensile foot was the chief part to come into contact with 

 the ground, and that in this way according to the law of 

 adaptation it acquired its present importance as one of the 

 three points of support for the human body. 



It has been remarked already that Charles Morris is of 

 the opinion that the shortness of the human arm has been 

 inherited and not acquired. According to E. D. Cope 2 man 

 also inherited a foot adapted for locomotion. Both these 

 views are fundamentally opposed to the anthropoid origin of 

 man. According to Cope's theory, man's early progenitors 

 never led an arboreal life, whereas the foot of the ape has 

 become prehensile through adaptation. Cope assumes the 

 common parent form of man and the apes to have been the 

 Phenacodus, an order belonging to the early Tertiary Period, 

 which must have possessed a prehensile hand and a foot con- 

 structed for support and locomotion. From the Phenacodus, 

 remains of which are found in the oldest eocene strata of 



1 Corr.-Blatt d. deutsch. Gesellsch.f. Anthropologie, etc., 1904, No. 8, pp. 

 62-64. 



2 The Geological Magazine, London, 1886, p. 238. 



