118 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



Evidence as to Mans Place in Nature. By Prof. Huxley, F.E.S. 

 8vo. Williams and Norgate. 1863. 



This work, which to biological inquirers who take an interest in the 

 supreme question of Anthropological science — the origin of man, and the 

 probability of his derivation from an inferior form — will prove a source of 

 the deepest possible study and examination, is now published. It has so 

 many points of similarity with the volume of Sir Charles Lyell on a cog- 

 natesubject, that we shall prefer to discuss in a future number the whole 

 question of man's antiquity. In the meanwhile we select a few of the 

 passages by which Prof. Huxley advocates those conclusions to which he 

 has been led during the past few years. 



The work is divided into three essays: 1, the Natural History of the 

 Man-like Apes ; 2, the Relation of Man to the Lower Amimals ; 3, the 

 Fossil Remains of Man. As the criticism o£ the first two essays does not 

 fall within the sphere of the ' Geologist,' we shall confine our remarks to 

 the third essay. 



It was Prof. Huxley's object " to show, in the preceding essay, that the 

 Anthropini, or man family, form a very well-defined group of the Pri- 

 mates, between which and the immediately following family, the Catarhini, 

 there is in the existing world the same entire absence of any transitional 

 form or connecting link, as between the Catarhini and Platyrhini." 



He confines himself in his remarks to the consideration of the skulls 

 from Engis and the Neanderthal, and endorses the conclusion of Sir 

 Charles Lyell, that the former " belonged to a contemporary of the mammoth 

 (M. primigenius) and of the woolly rhinoceros (_B. tickdrhinus), with the 

 bones of which it was found associated ;" and that the Neanderthal skull is 

 of great, though uncertain antiquity. Whatever may be the geological age of 

 the latter skull, he conceives it is quite safe (on the ordinary principles of 

 palaeontological reasoning), to assume that the former takes us to, at least, 

 the " further side of the vague biological limit, which separates the present 

 geological epoch from that which immediately preceded it. And there 

 can be no doubt that the physical geography of Europe has changed won- 

 derfully since the bones of men and mammoths, hyasnas, and rhinoceroses 

 were washed pell-mell into the cave of Engis." 



The description of the discovery of the Engis bones by Dr. Schmerling, 

 as well as Prof. Huxley's notes thereon, follow. With respect to the 

 Neanderthal skeleton, Prof. Busk's translation of Schaaffhausen is quoted 

 at length. In Prof. Huxley's original observations he describes two beau- 

 tiful photographs which he had received from Dr. Fuhlrott, the first of 

 m hicli demonstrates the great extension of the thickened supraciliar}- ridges 

 beyond the cerebral cavity, and exhibits the wide openings of the frontal 

 sinuses upon the inferior surface of the frontal part of the skull, into which, 

 according to Fuhlrott, a probe ma} 7 be introduced to the depth of an inch; 

 and the second " exhibits the edge and the interior of the posterior, or 

 occipital part of the skull, and shows very clearly the two depressions for 

 the lateral sinuses, sweeping inwards towards the middle line of the roof 

 of the skull, to form the longitudinal sinus." Prof. Huxley concludes that 

 the posterior lobe of the brain of the Neanderthal man was exceedingly 

 flattened and. depressed, and that the posterior cerebral lobes must have 

 projected considerably beyond the cerebellum. 



After dilating at length on the varied forms of the human cranium, on 

 which Prof. Huxley odors some most valuable remarks, he arrives at the 

 conclusion that no comparison of " crania is worth very much that is not 

 founded upon the establishment of a relatively fixed base-line, to which the 



