i8yi.] Notices of Books. 251 



and the gorilla. Of these the gibbons, or Hylobates, comprise 

 half-a-dozen species scattered over the Islands of Java, Sumatra, 

 and Borneo, the Malayan Peninsula, and a portion of the Continent 

 of Hindostan; the true Simla, or orang, is found only in Sumatra 

 and Borneo ; while the Troglodytes, or chimpanzee and gorilla, 

 belong to North Africa. Fossil remains of other anthropoid 

 apes have also been found in South Europe ; so that we may 

 consider the family to have extended at one time over the whole 

 of the warmer portions of the Old World. Now, seeing that the 

 raw material, so to speak, of the human race had this wide dis- 

 tribution, it is difficult to explain the fact, — if we suppose with 

 Darwin that no internal predisposing cause has been at work, — 

 that in one spot only in this vast region have the circumstances 

 been sufficiently favourable to evolve from the pre-existing 

 materials the more highly developed form. The ordinary course 

 of nature would have been for one race of men to have become 

 developed in the Islands of the Indian Archipelago, another in 

 Africa, and another possibly in South Europe, so distinct that 

 they could not be confounded with one another, and each adapted 

 to the circumstances in which he was placed. We may take a 

 similar instance from the equine tribe, which, until the discovery 

 of the fossil Hipparion, was considered to be a family without 

 near relatives in past or present times. The equine progenitor, 

 however, the Hipparion, has become developed into the horse, 

 the ass, the zebra., and some other forms, forming species so ab- 

 solutely distinct that they either refuse to interbreed or produce 

 only sterile hybrids. 



Man presents a very singular exception to the general law, 

 that widely distributed species belong to genera which include a 

 large number of species ; in other words, have many very near 

 relatives. A case of extreme differentiation, similar in some respects 

 to that of man, is furnished by the giraffe ; but Mr. Mivart has 

 shown in his " Genesis of Species " the difficulties in the way 

 of the theory that the giraffe has been developed from other 

 African genera of Ungulata by the operation of natural selection 

 alone. 



Again, the gap between the higher apes and man is, by the 

 admission of all who have studied the subject, so enormous, that 

 we might fairly expect that geological researches would have 

 laid bare some of the intermediate links. Remains of an- 

 thropoid apes have been discovered in Greece, but they are 

 manifestly those of anthropoid apes and nothing else. Remains 

 of man have been found of enormous antiquity, contemporary 

 with the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, but we have the 

 authority of Professor Huxley (who has probably given the subject 

 more attention than anyone else, and who is assuredly not 

 biassed against the developmental hypothesis) for asserting that 

 the Engis and the Neanderthal skulls " can in no sense be re- 

 garded as the remains of a human being intermediate between 



