24 PROFESSOR OWEN ON THE OSTEOLOGY OF 
every other part of the skull for brute force, must strike the eye at once as the leading 
distinction between the Ape and the Man. 
The superior size of the trunk in proportion to the height of the Gorilla, and the 
disposition and arrangement of the ribs and pelvis for the support and defence of a 
more capacious thoracic-abdominal cavity, are more especially conspicuous on a front 
view (Pl. XII.). The trunk of the Gorilla, according to the Human standard, would 
represent that of a giant of some eight feet in height ; and the jaws and upper limbs 
have a proportional or corresponding magnitude: but the size of the constituent bones 
is such as to exhibit, in this part of the skeleton, much greater breadth, strength, and 
massiveness than is present in the Irish Giant of that height in the Museum of the Royal 
College of Surgeons’. 
The plane of the scapula looks less backward in the Gorilla, the glenoid angle being 
inclined rather more obliquely forward than in Man; a greater proportion of the 
posterior surface of the scapula is thus seen in a direct side view of the Gorilla’s 
skeleton; but the position of the thorax in the Human skeleton, photographed for 
Pl. XIII, exaggerates the difference. The effect of the actual difference is to bring 
the shoulder-joints in the Gorilla more forward than in Man, with a concomitant 
difference in the usual position of the clavicles, which extend from the sternum more 
directly outward and less obliquely backward to join the acromion, than in Man. In 
like manner the joints of the femora, through the shape and direction of the ossa 
innominata, are brought more forwards, being in advance of, instead of posterior to, 
the lumbar vertebre or basis of the true vertebral column. All this, while it favours 
the application of the limbs to the grasping of the trunk or branch of a tree, takes away, 
in the same degree, from their adaptability to sustain the body in the erect posture. 
The blade-bones, with their proportionally broader coracoid and acromion, are spread 
out, by their long clavicular buttresses, beyond the upper part of the thorax, to a greater 
proportional degree than in Man; giving a greater breadth across the shoulders, with 
corresponding advantage and power in the working of the upper extremities. 
These extremities, though so long in respect of the whole body, bear to the trunk 
nearly the’same proportions as in Man. ‘Take away the lower limbs in both skeletons, 
and this similarity becomes more obvious. In both the lower ends of the antibrachial 
bones, as the arm hangs down, reach the same transverse line as the ischial tuberosities ; 
and they descend scarcely an inch below those parts inthe Chimpanzee. ‘The embryonal 
proportions of the lower limbs brings down the stature of the Gorilla below that of the 
average in the well-formed European, 
In a skeleton of such, measuring 5 feet 9 inches from the vertex to the sole, the 
length of the trunk is 2 feet 6 inches; in the skeleton of a male Gorilla, measuring 
* The trunk in this skeleton, from the atlas to the ischial tuberosities, measures 3 feet 43 inches, that in the 
Gorilla measuring 3 feet ; but the trunk is supported in the Irish Giant on limbs of nearly twice the length of 
those in the great Gorilla. 
