118 
THE GEOLOGIST. 
Evidence as to Mans Place in Nature. By Prof. Huxley, F.E.S. 
870. Williams and Norgate. 1863. 
This work, wliicli 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- 
nate subject, 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 IS^atural History of the 
Man-like Apes ; 2, the Relation of Man to the Lower Amimals ; 3, the 
Fossil Remains of Man. As the criticism of 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 tlie 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 Catavhini and Plntyrhini.'' 
He confines himself in his remarks to the consideration of the skulls 
from Engis and the iXeanderthal, and endorses the conclusion of Sir 
Charles Lyell. that the former " belonged to a contemporary of the mammoth 
{E. primigenins) and of the woolly rhinoceros (i?. tichorhinus), 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, hyaenas, 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 
which demonstrates the great extension of the thickened supraciliary ridges 
beyond the cerebrarcavity, 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 may 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 ver^- 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 Xeanderthal 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 offers 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 
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