﻿Vol. 66.] ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OE THE PRESIDENT. lxxvii 



that Man is very closely related by blood to the anthropoid apes, 

 less closely to the Cercopithecidse, and only remotely to the apes of 

 the New World. With the lemurs his blood shows no more affinity 

 than with the rest of the Mammalia. The relationship may be ex- 

 pressed by figures, according to the amount of precipitate obtained 

 in experimenting with the various animals in question ; it is given 

 as a percentage in the following table : — 



Man 100 



Orang 80 



Cynocephalus mormou 50 



Cerc&pithecus petatirista 50 



Ateles vcllerosus 25 



Lernur 



Thus, by a number of independent lines of enquiry, all converging 

 towards the same result, we are led to conclude that Man finds his 

 nearest congeners in the higher apes, especially the gorilla and 

 chimpanzee. Xext to these follow with increasing remoteness 

 the gibbon, Semnopiiheeus, the other lower Catarrhine apes, and 

 the extinct lemurs. The question then naturally arises whether 

 this series may not represent more or less approximately the 

 successive stages in his ancestral descent. 



A number of famous anatomists have thought that it does, and 

 such a conclusion might almost seem obvious. The obvious > 

 however, is always open to suspicion, and E. D. Cope, 1 as early as 

 1893, suggested another line of descent, from which the Catarrhini 

 were excluded, the Anthropomorpha (among which Cope included 

 Man) being directly derived from the ancient primitive Lemuroids. 



The origin of Man in particular was sought, not among the 

 existing man-like apes, but in some member of that group now 

 extinct. In this, of course, there was nothing new, for no one, so 

 far as I am aware, has ever regarded any living species of ape as 

 the immediate ancestor of Man. Indeed many anatomists, Huxley 

 in particular, have* repeatedly insisted on the singular manner in 

 which human characters are distributed among the existing- 

 Anthropoids, some making a nearer approach to Man in one 

 direction, some in another ; a fact which seems to suggest 

 community of origin. 



But the other proposal to derive the Anthropomorpha direct from 

 ancestral lemurs was unquestionably new, indeed revolutionary, and 

 the chief claim it has to our serious consideration lies in the remark- 

 able sagacity which underlies so many of the other bold speculations 



1 'The Genealogy of Man American Naturalist, vol. xxvii (1893) pp. 816-35. 



