Editorial Comment. 181 
Last of all, Pitheccanthropus erectus has appeared, from 
Java. Dr. Eugene Dubois has given the details of the dis- 
covery and an elaborate description of his anthropoid fea- 
tures. His descriptions and conclusions have been widely 
published and have met with cautious and partial acceptance. 
The materials on which Dr. Dubois bases his conclusions 
consist of a skull, a tooth and a femur. The skull is interme- 
diate in size, between the average gorilla and civilized man, 
but when compared with the average skull of savage man, as 
has been done by Sir Wm. Turner,* who assumes the Austra- 
lian as a fair example of the modern savage, the fossil skull 
falls but little below the average of the male and exceeds the 
size of the female. Skulls of other savage races, such as those 
of the Andaman islanders, Admiralty islanders, Bush people, 
Veddahs and hill tribes of India, range about the same in size 
as the skull from Java. 
The third upper molar tooth was not immediately connected 
with the skull, but was found at a distance of one metre from 
it and the femur at a distance of fifteen metres. The renin ins 
may have resulted from different individuals, and in the 
opinion of Prof. Turner the tooth has strong evidence of not 
being human, but rather the tooth of an orang, which still in- 
habits Borneo and Sumatra. 
As to the femur, while exhibiting some peculiarities by 
which it departs from the normal human femur, and assumes 
characters which, in the opinion of Dr. Dubois, mark it as de- 
rivable from the anthropoid apes, yet it is also found, by 
comparison with a large number of human femora, that, ac- 
cording to Prof. Turner, the same peculiarities are occasionally 
met with, and hence they lose their value as criteria for differ- 
entiating this bone from human remains At best, this femur 
is assignable to the Neanderthal race, which by all is consid- 
ered of human and not of simian type. It should be remarked 
also that the distance which separated the femur from the 
skull, and the comparative freshness of the former, render it 
extremely improbable that they came from the same skeleton. 
Hypothesis, therefore, and hypothesis only, supports as yet 
the derivation of man from the ape. n. h. w. 
♦Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. xx. 
