574 THE NEANDERTHAL SKULL 
affinity to the apes. Only a few points of proximate resemblance 
have been made out between it and the human skull, and these are 
strictly peculiar to the latter in the fcetal state.” 
The whole purport of my essay on this subject, having been to 
prove a proposition exactly opposite to Professor King’s, viz. that 
among recent human skulls it is possible to select a series which shall 
lead by insensible gradations from the Neanderthal skull up to the 
most ordinary forms, I must refer to the arguments used therein, 
contenting myself with assuring Professor King that I have not in the 
slightest degree, “assumed a resemblance closer than exists” between 
certain Australian crania, and the Neanderthal skull ; on the contrary, 
I shall endeavour to show by additional evidence at the end of the 
present notice, that a cast of the interior of the skull, representing the 
brain of the Neanderthal man, presents an even closer resemblance in 
form to a cast of the interior of a particular Australian skull than does 
the exterior of his skull. 
2. Professor King, as we have just seen, regards the Neanderthal 
man as a new species at least, perhaps as the type of a new genus. 
Geheime-Rath Professor Mayer of Bonn goes to the other end of 
the scale of opinion, and propounds the hypothesis that the debateable 
skull was, after all, only that of a rickety “ Mongolian Cossack,” be- 
longing to one of the hordes driven by Russia, through Germany, 
into France in 1814. 
I had written that Professor Mayer gravely propounds this hypo- 
thesis, but I have erased the italicised word ; for, in truth, the work is 
not gravely done, but is laden with numerous jocosities of small size, 
but great ponderosity, directed against Mr. Darwin and his doctrines. 
Such recalcitrations will not greatly affect that sick lion, but it must be 
confessed they do not lead one to feel much tenderness towards his 
assailant. And yet, as I shall proceed to show, the learned Professor 
can hardly afford to throw stones with so much vehemence and so 
little discrimination. 
The opening passage of his essay, for example, contains as many 
errors as paragraphs. 
“The discovery of these fossil fragments of a human skeleton, or 
rather of a skull only, has lately excited so much attention among the 
naturalists of England, and they have based such far-reaching con- 
clusions [weitgreifende Folgerungen] upon it, although acquainted 
with nothing more than the figure of the calvaria on a small scale, 
given by Professor Schaafhausen in Muller’s Archiv for 1858 (*), 
that I am instigated to publish my own investigations on these fossil 
1 Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, 1863. 
