AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT 



genealogy and called an offshoot from 

 this direct line, but one arising just before 

 the line had culminated in undoubted 

 human kind. In a famous discussion, 

 held around the actual fossils brought by 

 their discoverer to the Zoological Congress 

 at Leyden in 1895, and participated in by 

 an extraordinary gathering of the most 

 eminent anthropologists of the world, 

 five of these experts maintained that 

 Pithecanthropus was an ape, seven that 

 it was a man, and seven others that it 

 was a transition form between man and 

 the anthropoids. The discussion was one, 

 you see, primarily of precise classification; 

 there was practical agreement that this 

 creature of uppermost Pliocene or lowest 

 Pleistocene time was so much like an ape 

 and at the same time so much like a man 

 that it proved, if proof were still needed, 

 that as far as structure, at least, is con- 

 cerned the anthropoids and man differ 

 only quantitatively and not qualitatively. 

 Now Pithecanthropus lived at least 

 from five hundred thousand to one million 

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