i8 PROFESSOR OWEN ON THE OSTEOLOGY OF 
buttress, additional power to the femur in sustaining superincumbent weight or pressure. 
The canal of the medullary artery (m) usually begins just above this prominent part, 
passing obliquely upward into the bone. Near the lower third of the shaft the linea aspera 
bifurcates,—one ridge, the best marked (a), passing to the outer condyle, the other 
diverging towards the inner condyle, but being widely interrupted by a smooth tract 
where the femoral artery bends obliquely backward to the popliteal space. Of the 
two supracondyloid protuberances, the entocondyloid one (k’) is the largest and 
usually the most prominent, and the terminal expansion of the bone is chiefly towards 
that side, especially on an anterior view (Pl. XII. fig. 1). The major part of the 
rotular surface is on the outer division or condyle, and the transverse concavity of the 
rotular surface is well marked though irregular, and deeper towards the inner side. Both 
condyloid surfaces are continued from the rotular one backwards, the condyles diverging, 
with concomitant expansion of the intercondyloid space, as they pass backwards. The 
inner condyle descends lower, or has more vertical extent than the outer one, this 
being rather Jonger from before backward. 
The great proportional length of the femur, the well-defined trochanters with their 
connecting ridge, the ferward curvature of the shaft, the buttress-like development of 
the linea aspera, the proportions and directions of the distal condyles necessitating the 
oblique position of the shaft to bring them on the horizontal line, and the extent of 
surface in that plane which the condyles present to the tibia, are all brought out saliently 
by the foregoing comparisons, as the principal characteristics of the Human femur, in 
relation to the peculiar upright posture and bipedal gait and progression of the Human 
species’. 
* Since the foregoing descriptions were communicated to the Zoological Society, I have been favoured by 
Dr. Kaup with the cast of a fossil femur from the Eppelsheim miocene, near Darmstadt, and with the request that 
I would compare it with the femora of the large Anthropoid Apes in our metropolitan Museums. This femur is 
11 in. 3 lines in length, is 2 in. across the proximal, and 1 in. 7 lines across the distal end, and measures 2 in. 4 lines 
in circumference. It retains all the lower quadrumanal characters of the bone, with nearly the Gibbon-like propor- 
tions as to length and slenderness. The shaft is straight, without the least forward bend ; the distal end becomes 
gradually and almost symmetrically expanded, and in an inferior degree to that in the Chimpanzee, Gorilla, and 
Man ; the backward production of the condyles is much less. The linea aspera is as little marked as in the Gibbons ; 
the neck of the thigh-bone is as short, and the head as small, relatively, as in the Gibbons: all the modifications, in 
fact, relating to the use of the lower limb in maintaining the erect position, and which in their respective degrees 
are found in the Chimpanzee and Gorilla, marking their progressive approaches to the peculiar Human attitude, 
are as completely wanting in the fossil femur as in that of the recent Ungkas and Gibbons ; whence we may infer 
that, during the miocene period, there existed in the locality haunted by the Ape that has left its remains at 
Eppelsheim, a richly wooded tract, in which a Gibbon, or ‘long-armed Ape,’ of twice the size of those of the 
Eastern Indian Archipelago, enjoyed a strictly arboreal life. 
The shape of the shaft of the supposed humerus of the Dryopithecus, from the miocene of the South of France, as 
figured in M. Lartet’s Memoir (Comptes Rendus de Il’ Académie des Sciences, Juillet 28, 1856), agrees with that 
of the Eppelsheim femur. 
