THE EARLIEST MEN 185 



The Trinil Remains.* Discovered in Java by 

 Dubois in 1891. They consist of the top part of a 

 skull, two molar teeth, and a thigh bone found in 

 the same locality, but forty-six feet apart. They 

 were clearly not an interment, and the first diffi- 

 culty which arises with regard to them is whether 

 they all belonged to the same individual or not, 

 a difficulty which can perhaps never be set at rest. 

 An attempt to throw light upon this and other 

 disputed points was made by the expedition of 

 Mdme. Selenka, the results of which have been 

 recently published. After enormous labours nothing 

 was found with the exception of another tooth, 

 pretty certainly human. So far as can be ascer- 

 tained, for it has not yet been described, it did not 

 belong to the previously-described remains. It 

 is impossible to build any theory on this last tooth, 

 since it might have belonged to a man of com- 

 paratively recent period, and have come to lie 

 where it did in any one of several ways, e.g., by 

 falling down a deep crack in the earth. The remains 

 themselves have been assigned to a single individual 

 named Pithecanthropus erectus, but apart from the 

 initial difficulty alluded to above, the greatest 

 difference of opinion exists as to the character of 

 the skull. Dr. Munrot gives a list of seven author- 

 ities who look upon it as human, six who consider 

 it to be simian, and seven who believe it to be a 

 transitional form. Further, he quotes the follow- 

 ing amusing paragraph, which exemplifies the 



* See also p. 150. 



f Palaeolithic Man, p. 190. The points here mentioned are 

 additional to those given on pp. 151-3 of this work. 



