Ch. XIV.] UPPER MIOCENE STRATA OF GERS. 233 



In one of these deposits that eminent comparative anatomist discov- 

 ered, in 1837, the first remains of quadrumana which had been de- 

 tected in Europe. They were associated with the quadrupeds above 

 mentioned in beds of freshwater marl, limestone, and sand near Auch, 

 in the Department of Gers, about forty miles west of Toulouse. They 

 were referred by MM. Lartet and Blainville to a genus closely allied to 

 the Gibbon, to which they gave the name of Pliqpithecus. More recently 

 (1856) M. Lartet described another species of the same, family of long- 

 armed apes (Kgcobates), which he obtained from strata of the same 

 age at Saint-Gaudens, in the Haute Garonne. The fossil remains of 

 this animal consists of a portion of a lower jaw with teeth and the 

 shaft of a humerus. It is supposed to have been a tree-climbing fru- 

 givorous ape, equalling Man in stature. As the trunks of oaks are 

 common in the lignite beds in which it lay, it has received the generic 

 name of Dryopitliecus. The angle formed by the ascending ramus 

 of the jaw and the alveolar border is less open, and therefore more like 

 the human subject than in the Chimpanzee, and, what is still more 

 remarkable, the fossil, a young but adult individual, had all its milk 

 teeth replaced by the second set, while its last true molar (or wisdom 

 tooth) was still undeveloped, or only existed as a germ in the jaw-bone. 

 In the mode, therefore, of the succession of its teeth (which, as in all 

 the Old World apes, exactly agree in number with those in Man) it 

 differed from the Gorilla and Chimpanzee and corresponded with the 

 human species. 



This peculiarity in its dentition, however, it shared, as M. Lartet 

 reminds us, with one of the living Gibbons called the Siamang. It is 

 only one of several characters, such as the more globular form of the 

 cranium and the smaller size of the canine teeth of the lower jaw, in 

 which the Gibbons approach Man in their structure more nearly than 

 do any other of the tailless apes. There is an analogy between such 

 points of agreement and the fact that man and the Orang (Pithecus) 

 have each twelve pair of ribs, whereas the Gorilla and Chimpanzee 

 (Troglodytes), notwithstanding that in the aggregate of their charac- 

 ters they approach nearer to the human type than the Orang, have 

 each thirteen pair. A still more curious analogy is afforded by some 

 of the platyrrhine monkeys of South America, which, although they 

 differ from all the Old World quadrumana and from Man in having 

 fonr supernumerary molars, yet are not only less prognathous than the 

 catarrhine monkeys, but have the cerebellum more decidedly overlapped 

 by the posterior lobe of the cerebrum than the Old World apes. Yet 

 the brains of the latter are, on the whole, much more akin to the 

 human in their anatomical structure. 



BELGIAX AXD BRITISH MIOCEXE FORMATIONS. 



Upper Miocene near Antwerp. — Edeghem beds. — The black or Glau- 

 coniferous Crag of Antwerp was mentioned at page 208 as bearing a 



