President's Address. 
vii 
authority to the Lower Quaternary, the beginning at the Pleistocene. Is 
this fossil of human or simian nature ? Is it bridging the interval between 
man and anthropoids ? A storm of controversy has arisen on this 
question. There are those who consider it a human ancestor, but not 
quite human ; others as of truly human nature ; others again as a large 
Hylobates, and if such, it is a member of the Simiidae, and therefore a 
true ape. Duckworth comes to the conclusion that Pithecanthropus 
erectus " was an anthropoid ape of a degree of cephalisation far superior 
to any ape now existing ; and that in it we possess the nearest likeness 
yet found of the human ancestor." He agrees that the Trinil fossil was 
of a stature rather over the average. Keith, however, goes further, and 
not only does he believe Pithecanthroims to be as old as the Pliocene of 
Europe, or early Pleistocene, but he adds the characters of the femur 
leave no doubt, in spite of minor peculiar features, that the fossil man of 
Java was completely adapted for erect posture and erect progression as 
the man of to-day. There are no features in it which suggest the 
slouching gait of Neanderthal man." This is perhaps too affirmative a 
statement with regard to the latter, as we shall see later on. The few 
pieces found are the calvaria (upper portion of the skull), a femur 
(thigh-bone), and three teeth. The femur is sufficiently like the human 
bone for Yirchow's affirmation that this thigh-bone does not belong to 
the same individual to whom the calvaria does ; the first is that of a man, 
the second is that of an ape. 
It should be remembered, however, that the same Virchow decided 
that the calvaria of the Neanderthal man was that of a human idiot ; that 
Huxley was very careful not to express his opinion, and that Broca, of 
all anthropologists of repute, was the only one who, at the time, asserted 
that this portion of the skull belonged to a primitive man, but a man for 
all that, and not an ape or an idiot. 
A new light has been thrown on the phylogeny of the apes by the 
discovery in the Lower Tertiary of the Fayoum, in Egypt, probably 
Oligocene, of several forms of true apes, among which one, called by 
Schlosser Propliopithecus , which does really seem to represent an 
Anthropomorphic Ape ; leading, according to him, to the following 
evolutive filiation. 
Propliopithecus, PliopitheciLS , Hylobates, Dryopithecus, Troglodytes, 
Simia, Gorilla, Homo, with whom Pithecantropus, on characters taken 
from the jaw (although three teeth are only known), this author considers 
should mingle. 
And thus we are brought back to the contentious Oligocene flints of 
Thenay, Aurillac, Cromer Forest, Boncelles, &c., &c. Unfortunately for 
those who hold to the artefact character of these flints, the Oligocene 
ancestor of man would not have been physically able to chip flints, for its 
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