This character can be produced sporadically in any race whatsoever; it does not seem to possess any ethnic value in the human species, it seems to be connected most often with a certain muscular weakness and can be the result of a lesion affecting the upper part of the bone. As the femur of Trinil presents exactly such a lesion, resulting itself from a malady capable of entailing during a period of years a relative impotence of the lower members, it is quite possible and, I believe, even probable that if we should find a second femur from the same race, it would be very different from the one we possess.
This has none the less a very great importance, because it attests peremptorily the "marche bipède" which the cranial characters had been powerless to demonstrate in a sufficient manner, and the rather large size of the subject. It is sufficient for us to know that the femur of Trinil is not that of a monkey but that of an animal maintaining the upright position, an idea which is not in the least disturbed by pathologic considerations. If the femur in question had been completely sound, its form would have approached even more the ordinary human form. Such as it is, it does not recall, in my opinion, the femoral form of the gibbon any more than the Quaternary femur of Spy, described by Mr. Fraipont, recalls the femoral form of the gorilla, provided one does not take into consideration the characters connected with an upright position. In other words, the femur of Spy, although human, would not be less pithecoid than that of Java.
Mr. Hepburn[1] of Edinburgh does not regards the characters of the femur of Trinil as sufficiently pronounced to form a genus distinct from the genus Homo. These characters are human and not simian. Upon this point, we are in accord. He adds that if the femur comes from a human being, and if the teeth and skull belong to the same, then the conclusion relative to the femur should apply also to the skull and the teeth.
On this last point, the justice of the conclusion depends on the signification attached to the term human being. If the femur of Trinil, considered separately, proves that its possessor was not a monkey, it certainly does not prove that its possessor ought to be classed according to the totality of its conformation in the human species, or genus, so far as known. I have already insisted at length upon this fact, that the femur can be morphologically very human in a being low enough with respect to cranial development to merit only conventionally the name of man. It is necessary, then, to take into account its skull and its teeth, as well as its femur, in an estimation of
- ↑ Journal of Anatomy and Physiology, vol. xxxi.
