L. Manouvrier — Pithecanthropus erectus. 221 



This character can be produced sporadically in any race 

 whatsoever ; it does not seem to possess any ethnic value in the 

 human species, it seems to be connected most often with a 

 certain muscular weakness and can be the result of a lesion 

 affecting the upper part of the bone. As the femur of Trinil 

 presents exactly such a lesion, resulting itself from a malady 

 capable of entailing during a period of years a relative impo- 

 tence of the lower members, it is quite possible and, I believe, 

 even probable that if we should find a second femur from the 

 same race, it would be very different from the one we possess. 



This has none the less a very great importance, because it 

 attests peremptorily the " marche bipede " which the cranial 

 characters had been powerless to demonstrate in a sufficient 

 manner, and the rather large size of the subject. It is suffi- 

 cient for us to know that the femur of Trinil is not that of a 

 monkey but that of an animal maintaining the upright position, 

 an idea which is not in the least disturbed by pathologic con- 

 siderations. If the femur in question had been completely 

 sound, its form would have approached even more the ordinary 

 human form. Such as it is, it does not re'call, in my opinion, the 

 femoral form of the gibbon any more than the Quaternary 

 femur of Spy, described by Mr. Fraipont, recalls the femoral 

 form of the gorilla, provided one does not take into considera- 

 tion the characters connected with an upright position. In 

 other words, the femur of Spy, although human, would not 

 be less pithecoid than that of Java. 



Mr. Hepburn* of Edinburgh does not regards the characters 

 of the femur of Trinil as sufficiently pronounced to form a 

 genus distinct from the genus Homo. These characters are 

 human and not simian. Upon this point, we are in accord. 

 He adds that if the femur comes from a human being, and if 

 the teeth and skull belong to the same, then the conclusion 

 relative to the femur should apply also to the skull and the 

 teeth. 



On this last point, the justice of the conclusion depends on 

 the signification attached to the term human being. If the 

 femur of Trinil, considered separately, proves that its possessor 

 was not a monkey, it certainly does not prove that its possessor 

 ought to be classed according to the totality of its conformation 

 in the human species, or genus, so far as known. I have 

 already insisted at length upon this fact, that the femur can be 

 morphologically very human in a being low enough with 

 respect to cranial development to merit only conventionally 

 the name of man. It is necessary, then, to take into account 

 its skull and its teeth, as well as its femur, in an estimation of 



* Journal of Anatomy and Physiology, vol. xxxi. 



