472 ON OUR PRESENT KNOWLEDGE OF THE ORIGIN OF MAN. 



the doctrine of evolution necessarily connected with it. With the great- 

 est obstinacy he has maintained the doctrine of the constancy of species, 

 which is now abandoned by all naturalists of good judgment; but in 

 what now consists the essential idea of a "true species" he can no more 

 tell than any other opponent of evolution. The most important conclu- 

 sion from the latter, the " descent of man from the ape," Virchow is well 

 known to attack with zeal and energy. " It is quite certain that man 

 did not descend from the apes." This assertion of the Berlin pathol- 

 ogist has been for twenty years past repeated innumerable times in 

 religious and other periodicals — cited as the decisive judgment of the 

 very highest authority — not caring in the least that now almost all 

 experts of good judgment hold the opposite conviction. According to 

 Virchow the ape-man is a mere "figment of a dream;" the petrified 

 remains of Pithecanthropus are the palpable contradiction of such an 

 unfounded theoretical assertion. 



How directly fruitful the great advances in paleontology for the last 

 thirty years also are for our pithecoid theory can best be shown by the 

 example of the legion of the primates itself. Cuvier, the founder of 

 scientific paleontology, asserted up to the time of his death (1832) that 

 there were no petrifactions of apes; the only fossil lemur whose skull 

 he described (Adapts) he erroneously took for a hoofed animal. 



The first petrified remains of apes were discovered in India, in 1836, 

 in 1838 the Mesoplthecus penthelicus was discovered near Athens, and 

 in 1862 further remains of lemurs. But within the last twenty years 

 so numerous remains of extinct primates have become known to us 

 through the discoveries of Gaudry, Filhol, Schlosser, and especially 

 by the rich finds of the American paleontologists Marsh, Cope, 

 Leidy, Osboru, Ameghino, and others, that we have now obtained a 

 satisfactory general insight into the rich development of this highest 

 legion of mammals during the Tertiary period. With great admiration 

 I have recently seen in London the instructive series of fossil primates 

 which is displayed in the noble paleontological section of the museum 

 of natural history in South Kensington, in which there is a gigantic 

 fossil lemur which was nearly as large as a man, and which Forsyth 

 Major recently discovered upon the island of Madagascar (Megaladapis 

 m a dagascarien sis). 



Now, as in Cuvier's time, the most important differences between the 

 two principal groups of true apes consists in the characters of the 

 teeth. Man, like the Old-World apes, possesses thirty-two teeth of 

 very characteristic structure and arrangement. The New-World apes 

 have, on the contrary, thirty-six teeth, namely, one more premolar in 

 each half Of either jaw. Comparative odontology is authorized to state 

 on phylogenetic grounds that this number has arisen by reduction 

 from a higher dental formula, from forty-four teeth; for this typical 

 form of dentition (in each half jaw, above and below, three incisors, 

 one canine, four premolars, and three molars) is common to all those 



