PRIMATES. 337 



kingdom, may now be completely put on one side as incompatible 

 with the spirit and method of natural science, yet there are still 

 differences of opinion as to the position of Man in the class of Mam- 

 malia, according to the value attributed to the peculiarities of his 

 bodily structure. While Cuvier, and more recently Owen and 

 others, establish a special order (Bimana) for Man, other investi- 

 gators, as Huxley and his followers, attach a much less importance 

 to the characters which separate Man from the anthropoid Apes, and, 

 in agreement with Linnseus, who included Man with the Apes in 

 his family of Primates, regard them only as of family value. The 

 most important anatomical differences between Man and the Apes 

 depend upon the configuration of the skull and the face, the structure 

 of the brain, the dentition and the formation of the extremities, the 

 arrangement of which, in connection with certain peculiarities of the 

 vertebral column, permit of the upright posture of the body in 

 walking. 



The rounded arched form of the spacious cranial capsule, the con- 

 siderable preponderance of the skull over the face, which is not 

 placed in front of the skull as in the anthropoid Apes and in other 

 animals, but almost at right angles beneath it, are essential human 

 characters, as are the relatively large mass of the brain, the great size 

 of the anterior and posterior lobes, and, finally, the great development 

 of the cerebraiconvolutions, which, however, in the Apes are arranged 

 on the same type. 



All these peculiarities, which are of the greatest importance for 

 the intellectual development of Man, cannot be regarded as funda- 

 mental distinctions, but must rather be ascribed to gradual deviations, 

 since there are still greater differences between the highest and 

 lowest Apes. Efforts have been vainly made to show that certain 

 parts, which are always present in Apes and other Mammals, are 

 absent in Man (prcemaxiUa Blumenbach Goethe) ; and the attempts 

 to prove the converse of this, viz., that there are parts of fundamental 

 value in the human organism (pes hippocampi minor Owen Huxley), 

 which are found in no other Mammal, have as completely failed. 

 Further, the completely continuous row of teeth, interrupted by no 

 gap for the opposed canines, a character by which the human denti- 

 tion is distinguished from that of the Catarrhina, is not an exclusive 

 human character, but is known in a fossil Ungulate (Anoplotheriuin) ; 

 while on the other hand similar gaps have been observed, certainly 

 only in exceptional cases (Kaffir skull in the Erlangen collection) in 

 the human dentition. The prominent chin of Man has indeed the 



VOL. ii. 22 



