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THE VOYAGE OF H.M.S. CHALLENGER. 
condition of man himself, than is the case with the black man. But, on the other hand, 
as has indeed been already stated on p. 114, in the proportions of the shaft of the lower 
limb to the shaft of the upper limb, and of the thigh to the upper arm, the black races 
are more widely removed from the apes than are Europeans, and the tendency to produce 
a femur with a prismatic shaft, which is the very opposite to a pithecoid character, is more 
marked in the Australians than in the white or yellow races. Also, whilst the Lapps and 
Esquimaux, of all the races which I have measured, most closely approach the apes in the 
proportions of thigh to upper arm, and of shaft of lower limb to shaft of upper limb, 
they are amongst the races most widely removed from the apes in the proportions of 
forearm to upper arm, and of leg to thigh. The Yahgan Fuegians, again, whilst they are, 
in the proportions of forearm to upper arm, the most ape-like of men, yet possess a 
platypellic pelvis and a platyhieric sacrum. 
I do not find, therefore, in the comparative study of the skeleton in the Races of 
Men, evidence that any one race dominates in all its characters over all other races ; or 
that any one race, in all its characters, is lower than all other races. Nevertheless there 
can be no doubt that Europeans in many of their most important skeletal characters, 
more especially those of the skull and pelvis, are more widely removed from mammals 
generally, than is the case with Negros, Kaffirs, Bushmen and Australians. There does 
not seem, however, to be a graded arrangement, such as would lead one to say that the 
white races, which we will assume to be the most highly developed, have been derived, 
by successive stages of slow and gradual perfecting of structure, from the lowest exist- 
ing black race, or, indeed, from any one of the existing black races. 
Weisbach concludes his analysis of the measurements of the body in living indivi- 
duals of different races of men, taken during the voyage of the “ Novara” by Drs. Scherzer 
and Schwarz, 1 by stating that resemblances in form and proportion to characters observed 
in apes are in no way exclusively concentrated in any single race, but are distributed 
amongst different races, in some in one direction, in others in another direction, and that 
even Europeans themselves are not free from such characters. Moreover, he regards these 
resemblances as evidence of the descent of man from an ape-like ancestor. 
In concluding this Report I have no intention to enter into a discussion of any 
speculative question connected with the remote origin of man. But this I may say, that 
in the form and proportion of the different parts of the skeleton, so far as I have made 
them objects of study, the so-called simian characters are not such as would lead any 
competent anatomist, either to mistake a human bone for the bone of an ape, or to say 
that in the fossil remains of man, so far as we know them, there is evidence that a 
transitional form between man and the higher apes at one time existed. 
1 Reise der Novara, Anthropologischer Thiel, p. 269/ Wien, 1867. 
