Ape, and quite as great as or even a trifle greater than the cranial capacity of some female Australians and Veddahs. But as these latter are not 5 feet in height, the Ape-like man had really a less capacious cerebral cavity. The skull in its profile outline stands roughly midway between that of a young Chimpanzee (young in order to do away with the secondary modifications caused by the crest) and the lowest human skull, that of Neanderthal Man. This creature is truly, as Professor Haeckel put it, "the long searched for 'missing link,'" in other words represents "the commencement of humanity."
The remains of Apes, more distinctly Apes than Pithecanthropus, are known from Miocene strata of France. Two genera, Pliopithecus and Dryopithecus, are known. The former appears to be close to Hylobates. Dryopithecus is more Man-like than any other, and seems to have been as large as a Chimpanzee. The incisors are human in their relatively small size. But it has been pointed out that the long and narrow symphysis of the lower jaw is a point of likeness to the Cercopithecidae.
Fam. 3. Hominidae.—Apart from Pithecanthropus, which perhaps is a member of this family, but whose remains permit us to leave it among the Simiidae, at least for the present, the family Hominidae contains but one genus, Homo, and probably but one species, H. sapiens. The characters of the family may therefore be merged in those of the genus.[1]
Though it is easy enough to distinguish a Man from an Ape, it is by no means easy to find absolutely distinctive characters which are other than "relative." As Professor Haeckel has pointed out, there are really only four characters which differentiate Man: these are the erect walk, and the consequent modification of the fore- and hind-limbs to that position; the existence of articulate speech; the faculty of reason. Whether one body of psychologists are right who argue that reason is a distinctive human attribute, not to be confused with the apparent reasoning powers of lower animals, or whether others are justified in separating Man only in degree from the lower animals, it is clear that this very diversity of opinion prevents us for the present from utilising such characters as absolute differences. In any case the discussion of these matters is beyond the scope of the present book.
- ↑ See especially Wiedersheim, The Structure of Man, transl. by Howes, London, 1895.
