352 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



Apes, we should have expected to find more particular reference 

 to the literature of the subject; not a complete bibliography, of 

 course, for that would entail too much labour and occupy too 

 much space, but a selection of titles of the more important books 

 or essays which have been published, with proper references to 

 the periodicals in which the essays are to be found. This would 

 be extremely useful to a reader desirous of pursuing the subject 

 in greater detail than the space at Mr. Lydekker's disposal 

 has enabled him to do. 



This remark applies forcibly to the very short section on 

 Fossil Apes (p. 57), in which the author, referring to the remains 

 of a fossil Chimpanzee found in Northern India, in rocks belonging 

 to the Pliocene or later division of the Tertiary period, draws the 

 conclusion that India was the original home of the ancestors of 

 all the large man-like Apes of the present day, and that from this 

 centre their descendants have gradually dispersed to the eastward 

 and south-westward. We have thus, he considers, an easy explana- 

 tion of the present peculiar geographical distribution of the various 

 groups of large man-like Apes now existing. Moreover, there is 

 sure evidence, he says, that at an earlier part of the Tertiary 

 period, known as the Miocene Age, at least one species of Anthro- 

 poid Ape (Dryopithecus) inhabited Western Europe, its remains 

 having been found in France. Mr. Lydekker, as an accomplished 

 palaeontologist, could of course give chapter and verse for these 

 statements, but the uninformed reader would have been glad to 

 have, if only in a brief foot-note, a reference to the particular 

 memoirs in which the discovery of these fossil remains in India 

 and France may be found detailed. 



In the order which includes the Monkeys the number of 

 species is so large that their classification and diagnosis is a very 

 troublesome matter, and we do not think that Mr. Lydekker has 

 made it quite so clear as he might have done. For example, if in 

 his prefatory remarks he had pointed out the chief characteristics 

 which serve to distinguish the old world species from the new, 

 and had then split up these sections into smaller groups, men- 

 tioning the peculiarities of each, his subsequent treatment of the 

 species would have been not only less confusing to the reader, 

 but would have rendered it very much easier to determine the 

 name and systematic position of any particular species that might 

 come under the reader's notice. His account of the Barbary 



