THE BONES 



59 



especially among the low prognathous races, whence Darwin 

 concludes that the division must have been a constant character 

 of the early progenitors of man. Formerly the absence of the in- 

 termaxillary bone, bearing the incisors, ranked as one of the lead- 

 ing distinctive characters of the human face. This bone, which is 

 separated from the canine teeth by a suture was first described 

 by Galen ; later on Vesal, and after him, Peter Camper, Blu- 

 menbach and Sommering dispossessed man of it, judging it to 

 be the peculiar property of the lower animals, until Meckel, and 

 at the same time Goethe, proved it to be a normal formation in 

 man, transitionary and appearing at a very early stage, but 

 constant. Ranke l has definitely cleared up the point (see Fig. 

 1 6). The sutura incisiva (the suture dividing the back edge of 

 the palate of the two intermaxillary bones from the palate of 

 the upper jaw-bone) is always present in young mammals and 

 only later becomes indistinct, finally disappearing. In the 

 middle of the sutura incisiva is the foramen incisivum. The 

 sutura incisiva may be observed not only in the skull of the 

 newly born but also in adults; 

 indeed, it has been shown that, 

 as Autenrieth supposed, in the 

 human foetus, each of the upper 

 incisors is imbedded in a separate 

 intermaxillary bone, giving rise, 

 accordingly, to a sutura inter- 

 incisiva. 



Out of 100 skulls from the 



Munich Collection examined by FIG. 16. Human palate with inter- 

 r> I ... maxillary bones. (Ranke.) 



Kanke, the sutura incisiva was 



found in 73 per cent, the sutura interincisiva in 10 per cent. 

 Thus we see that the intermaxillary bone is by no means to be 

 considered a peculiarity of the lower animals, nor are we justi- 

 fied in regarding the divided nasal bone as a specific character 

 of man, as asserted by Wiedersheim, 2 for the nasal bone is 

 frequently found divided in other mammals, and though in 

 certain apes it grows together in early youth, the suture re- 



l Corr.~Blattf. Anthrop., etc., 1901, p. 96. 



2 Wiedersheim, R., Dei- Ban desMenschen als Zeugms fur seine Vergangen- 

 heit, Freiburg, 1887, p. 66. 



