jy 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 (PI. 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 longer from before backward. 



The great proportional length of the femur, the well-defined trochanters with their 

 connecting ridge, the forward 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 tlie Zoological Society, I have been favoured by 

 Dr. Kaup with the cast of a fossil femur from the Eppelsheim miocene, near Darmstadt, and with tlie request that 



I would compare it with the femora of the large Anthropoid Apes in our metropolitan Museums. This femur is 



I I 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 rAcademie des Sciences, JuiUet 28, 1856), agrees with that 

 of the Eppelsheim femur. 



