ORGANIC EVOLUTION 6x 



those of man, the snail, the crocodile, and the 

 horse — antecedent forms of structure have been 

 found in almost unbroken gradations leading back 

 to types differing immensely from their existing 

 representatives. Bones and fossils of men have 

 been found buried beneath the alluvium of rivers, 

 under old lava-beds, and in caves, crusted over by 

 the deposits of percolating waters. Many such 

 fossils are found in quaternary rocks, along with 

 the bones of animals still living and some extinct. 

 Some of these remains indicate unmistakable 

 affinities with the ape. The most celebrated of 

 these discoveries is the fossil of an erect ape-man 

 {Pithecanthropus erectus), found by a Dutch Governor 

 on the island of Java in 1894. This fossil, in the 

 shape and size of the head and in its general struc- 

 ture, strikes about as near as could be the middle 

 between man and ape. That it is the fossil of an 

 ambiguous form is indicated by the fact that, when 

 it was examined by a company of twelve special- 

 ists at Berlin soon after its discovery, three of them 

 declared it to be the remains of an individual 

 belonging to a low variety of man ; three others 

 thought it was a large anthropoid ; while the other 

 six held that it was neither man nor anthropoid, 

 but a genuine connecting link between them. It 

 is discussed at length by Haeckel in ' The Last 

 Link,' a paper read before the International Con- 

 gress of Zoology, at Cambridge, in 1898. * It is,' 

 says the veteran biologist, * the much - sought 

 " missing link " supposed to be wanting in the 

 chain of primates which stretches unbroken from 



