THE PHYLOGENESIS OF VERTEBRATES 43 



cisely intermediate between Homo primigenius and the an- 

 thropoid apes, were discovered in Java in 1891 in deposits of 

 the late Tertiary period, and were named Pithecanthropus 

 erectus, the generic name, " ape-man," having been proposed 

 some years before for the then hypothetical transition form, the 

 " missing link " of popular fancy. These remains consist of 

 a cranium, a femur and three molar teeth, and although not 

 found in contact with one another, their relation to their 

 surroundings was such as to declare them the -fragments of a 

 single skeleton. 



In the cranium the ape-like characters seen in Homo primi- 

 genius are here still more pronounced ; the cranial vault is still 

 lower, the superciliary ridges are still more prominent, closely 

 approximating those of a chimpanzee or gibbon. The pro- 

 portions of the teeth suggest a dental arcade intermediate be- 

 tween the flattened form seen in man and the elongated arch 

 of the living anthropoids; the probable shape of the tongue 

 and hard palate, as deduced from this, would seem to have 

 allowed the production of many of the more elementary sounds 

 occurring in human speech. An independent fact that corrob- 

 orates this conclusion was determined later when the con- 

 figuration of the brain surface was obtained by means of a 

 cast of the interior of the cranium, for here the center of 

 articulate speech (the left lower frontal convolution) was 

 found to have been more developed than in the highest apes 

 but considerably less so than in man. 



The femur does not exhibit the transitional characters 

 which one would be led to expect from the nature of the 

 cranium, for it is essentially human in form and shows a 

 higher type than that of the European Homo primigenius. 

 Pithecanthropus must thus represent a parallel or collateral 

 form in which the development in the direction of an erect 

 position had reached a high plane while the cranium and 

 brain remained at a stage intermediate between the highest 

 apes and the Neanderthal man. 



Concerning the ancestry of Pithecanthropus and its rela- 

 tionships to the apes the widest opinions still prevail, but the 



