THE NEANDERTHAL SKULL 587 
prior to the day of discovery, we are altogether ignorant, its geological 
age is quite uncertain. In coming to any conclusion, therefore, we have 
no facts to guide us save those which are furnished by an examination 
of its structural characters and whatever marks of degradation these 
may exhibit, yet they are closely paralleled on the crania of some 
of the men, and women too, now living and moving in our midst.” 
With all this I cordially concur, desiring only to add a caution as 
to confounding the evidence of the existence of pithecoid characters, 
with the conclusions that may be based on that evidence. If the 
dissector of Jeremy Bentham had found a fvator clavicile, or a couple 
of bellies of the flexor brevis digitorum arising from the tendons of the 
deep flexors of the foot, as is sometimes the case in man, he would 
have had a perfect right to say that these were pithecoid characters; but 
Fic. 2. 
Side view of the cast of the interior of the Neanderthal skull reduced to one half of the 
natural size. The outline represents the contour of a like cast of an Australian skull in the 
Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons (No. 5331) reduced to the same scale. «a. Cast of 
the inner face of the lambdoidal suture. Sy’. the Sylvian fissure. 
it by no means follows that he should have supposed the philosopher 
to be the ‘ missing link,’ or a homo pithecoides (Mayer). And, in like 
manner, the prominent superciliary ridges, the retreating occiput, and 
so forth, of the Neanderthal skull, are, to my mind, most indubitably 
pithecoid characters ; though I need hardly repeat the opinion, which 
I have so strongly expressed elsewhere, that the Neanderthal man was 
in no sense intermediate between men and apes. 
The duty of the anatomist appears to me to lie as little in eagerly 
