464 ON OUR PRESENT KNOWLEDGE OF THE ORIGIN OF MAN. 



the beginning of this century, grouped together us vertebrates the 

 four higher of the six classes of animals, lie immediately assigned to 

 man a position at their head. Linnaeus himself had already, in 1735, 

 in his fundamental "Systema Naturae," placed man at the head of the 

 mammals, grouping him with the apes and the lemurs in the " Anthropo- 

 morpha," or man-like creatures; later he called these dominant animals, 

 or "Primates," the "lords of creation." 



Man possesses in his bodily structure all the marks by which mam- 

 mals are separated from other vertebrates, and there has, therefore, 

 never been any controversy about his belonging to this class. On the 

 contrary, there are, even to this day, differences of opinion as to the 

 place to which man should be assigned in one of the orders of mam- 

 mals. Ouvier, when he made a new scientific classification of animals 

 (1817), followed the precedent of Blumenbach and created for man the 

 special order Bimana, or two-handed animals, in opposition to the apes 

 and lemurs, who were known as the Quadrumana, or four-handed 

 animals. This arrangement was retained for half a century in most 

 text-books. It first became untenable when Huxley showed, in 1863, 

 that it was based upon an anatomical error, and that t ; .ie apes were in 

 truth as much two handed as man. Thereupon the order of Primates 

 in the Linnaean sense was again restored. 



Most authors in the last thirty years have separated the Primates 

 into three suborders: (1) the lemurs (sProsimice) ; (2) the apes (Simice), 

 and (3) men (Anthropi). Again, other zoologists assign to man only 

 the rank of another family in the order of apes. The polymorphic 

 group of true apes (Simicv or Pitlieca) falls into two natural divisions 

 that are geographically quite distinct and have developed entirely 

 independent of each other in the western and the eastern hemispheres. 

 The American or western apes {Hesperopitheca) are distinguished by a 

 short, bony, auditory passage and a broad nasal septum. They are 

 therefore called the flat-nosed apes (Platyrrhincc). On the contrary, the 

 apes that inhabit Asia and Africa (in early times Europe also) have, like 

 man, a long auditory passage and a narrow nasal septum. They are 

 therefore called Ofd-World apes (Eopitheea), or also narrow-nosed apes 

 (Catarrhince). As man has in the rest of his bodily structure the mor- 

 phological characters of the Old-World apes and is,, like them, thus 

 distinguished from the apes of the New World, certain zoologists have 

 assigned to him a situation within the former group. Undoubtedly 

 this suborder of the catarrhines is an entirely natural division, whose 

 numerous living and extinct species are clearly united by many 

 important characters of bodily structure, but it embraces, nevertheless, 

 a long series of very different structural stages. The lowest dog-apes 

 (Cynopitheca), especially the baboons (Papiomorpha), appear like a 

 repulsive caricature of the noble human form. They remain at a very 

 low stage of development and are allied to the older platyrrhines and 

 prosimians. On the other hand, the tailless apes {Anthropomorpha) 



