AND AFFINITIES OF TARSIUS. 497 



cliaractei'S. It is reasonable to assume that the common ances- 

 tors of all these animals possessed all the primitive characters 

 retained by any of them. And so it is not surprising to find 

 any primitive character in any descendant of a common stock, 

 but there is no reason to suppose that, because any two have 

 retained the same primitive character, they should for that reason 

 be judged more nearly related than either may be with some other 

 descendant of the common stock. Primitive characters may be 

 useful for the description or definition of a group — they have 

 no value for assigning degrees of affinity. These considerations 

 ought to be commonplaces in zoological argument, but they are 

 often foi-gotten, and I think they have been entirely forgotten by 

 Professor Wood-Jones in the imposing list of common characters 

 that he has di-awn up for Man and Tarsius. Fortunately 

 they have been remembered by Mr. Pocock, a,nd Professors Hill 

 and Elliot Smith, and the considerations they adduce have dis- 

 posed of Professor Wood-Jones's argument that Tarsius has a 

 special relation to the ancestry of Man. It may not be a Lemur, 

 but it is no nearer to Man than to other Primates. 



Professor Wood- J ones, to whom we are indebted for originating 

 the interesting discussion, was more reticent to-night than in his 

 addresses to more populai- audiences. He attacked Darwinian 

 evolutionists, and Huxley in particular, on the supposition that 

 they believed genealogical trees to be linear, that a, higher group 

 took origin from the highest members of a lower group. It was 

 a strange misreading of familial' evidence. Were he to consult 

 Huxley's Essay on "Man's Place in Nature," or any general state- 

 ment of the case for Evolution, as, for instance, the Article under 

 that heading in the ' Encyclopedia Britannica,' he would see that 

 he was attacking a bogey that does not exist. Writer after 

 writer, with increasing insistence in recent years, has dwelt on 

 the obvious fact that existing groups are at most in the relation 

 of collateral descendants of a common ancestor, and the tendency 

 has been to place the common ancestor ever lower and lower on 

 the tree of life. 



Pi'of. MacBride, F.R.S.: — In summing up the discussion the 

 Chairman said that there was one point on which all the speakers 

 were agreed, viz., that Tarsius was much more nearly allied to 

 the higher Primates than it was to the Lemurs. But that was a 

 point which under any circumstances few would have disputed, 

 especially since Prof. Hubrecht's lesearches on the placentation 

 of this form which had been so ably summarised for us by Piof . 

 Hill. The whole interest of the question lay in Prof. Wood- Jones's 

 attempt to prove that Tarsius and Man agreed in retaining 

 important primitive characters which the otlier Monkeys had 

 lost — and in the obvious inference from this position, from which 

 Prof. Wood-Jones had rather shrunk during the discussion, hut 

 to which he had liberally committed himself in recent books 

 published by him. This inference was briefly that the human 



