Art. XXIV.—On Pithecanthropus erectus; by Professor L. Manouvrier of the Paris School of Anthropology.[1]
Extracts selected from two articles: "The Pithecanthropus erectus and the Theory of Evolution" (Revue Scientifique, 4me sér., t. v), and "Response to the Objections against the Pithecanthropus" (Bull. de la Soc. d'Anthrop. de Paris, 4me sér., t. vii). Translated by George Grant MacCurdy, M.A.
The Revue has already said a few words about an important scientific event which I now propose to discuss more fully.
It is a question of the discovery in Tertiary strata near Trinil, Java, of bones which seem to have belonged to a being intermediate between man and the anthropoids. This could be a precursor and perhaps an immediate ancestor of the human species, the link, heretofore lacking, of the chain which, according to the theory of evolution, ought to unite without interruption Homo sapiens with the rest of the animal kingdom. The author of this discovery is Mr. Eugene Dubois, physician in the Dutch army. The occasion was a vast geologic exploration made in Java, from 1890 to 1895, under the auspices of the government of Holland.
Such good fortune did not come to Mr. Dubois by hazard. He was attracted to the Indian archipelago in the hope of finding there, by means of important excavations about to be undertaken, the famous Missing Link theoretically foreseen, the existence of which should antedate Quaternary times. Certain hypotheses even considered the "Iles de la Sonde" as a possible cradle of the human race. Mr. Dubois, then, was guided by theoretic views; and if he has been fortunate in his research he has merited it by his competence as geologist and anatomist, also by the talent with which he has known how to turn his discovery to account.
It is all very well to find an inscription, it is another thing to decipher it. This latter task, as will be seen farther on, presented great difficulties which Mr. Dubois has overcome in a most creditable manner.
A very incomplete skull, two molar teeth picked up at a meter's distance from the skull, and a femur lying at some fifteen meters' distance, the whole enveloped in an earthy gang, very hard, and occurring in a bed which included other remains of a Pleistocene fauna to day for the most part extinct—such are the pieces of a more or less human appearance of which the specific determination was in question. It is obvious that
- ↑ Two illustrated papers on the Pithecanthropus erectus have already appeared in this Journal, both by Professor O. C. Marsh, who from the first regarded this new form as intermediate between man and the higher apes. See vol. xlix, p. 144, February, 1895; and vol. i, p. 475, June, 1896.—Ed.
