ago THE DOCTRINE OF DESCENT. 



double flexure of this axis; moreover, in the apes the 

 angles increase with age, which in man decrease, and 

 vice versa. Likewise in man the occipital foramen be- 

 comes more horizontal with age, more vertical in the ape. 

 But all this shows only, what the doctrine of Descent 

 asserts, that the two series, ape and man, diverge from 

 one another, and that the youthful individuals are more 

 alike than the older ones, — ^that the ape as he grows be- 

 comes more bestial; man, as the riddle of the sphinx 

 already intimated, more human. The flexure of the 

 basal bone and the horizontal position of the occipital 

 foramen occasions the upright gait, wherewith the dif- 

 ferentiation between hands and feet is completed. This 

 flexure of the cranial axis may therefore still be em- 

 phasized as a human character, in contradistinction to 

 the apes; the peculiar characteristic of an order can 

 scarcely be elicited from it; and especially as to the 

 question of Descent, this circumstance seems in no way 

 decisive. 



Not only as regards hand and foot, but also in denti- 

 tion and brain, the anthropomorphous apes approach 

 man much more nearly than they do the inferior wide- 

 nosed monkeys of the New World. These, have six 

 molar teeth, and their brain displays the imperfections 

 of the brain of the lemurs and rodents. Like the mon- 

 keys of the Old World, on the contrary, the anthro- 

 pomorphous apes possess five molar teeth, and every 

 portion of the human brain, even to the hippocampus 

 minor, is likewise present. The dispute as to this insig- 

 nificant portion of the brain, which R. Owen claimed 

 as an exclusively human characteristic, possesses a merely 

 historic interest, since, in conjunction with the posterior 



