the doctrine of evolution necessarily connected with it. With the greatest obstinacy he has maintained the doctrine of the constancy of species, which is now abandoned by all naturalists of good judgment; but in what now consists the essential idea of a "true species" he can no more tell than any other opponent of evolution. The most important conclusion from the latter, the "descent of man from the ape," Virchow is well known to attack with zeal and energy. "It is quite certain that man did not descend from the apes." This assertion of the Berlin pathologist has been for twenty years past repeated innumerable times in religious and other periodicals—cited as the decisive judgment of the very highest authority—not caring in the least that now almost all experts of good judgment hold the opposite conviction. According to Virchow the ape-man is a mere "figment of a dream;" the petrified remains of Pithecanthropus are the palpable contradiction of such an unfounded theoretical assertion.
How directly fruitful the great advances in paleontology for the last thirty years also are for our pithecoid theory can best be shown by the example of the legion of the primates itself. Cuvier, the founder of scientific paleontology, asserted up to the time of his death (1832) that there were no petrifactions of apes; the only fossil lemur whose skull he described (Adapis) he erroneously took for a hoofed animal.
The first petrified remains of apes were discovered in India, in 1836, in 1838 the Mesopithecus penthelicus was discovered near Athens, and in 1862 further remains of lemurs. But within the last twenty years so numerous remains of extinct primates have become known to us through the discoveries of Gaudry, Filhol, Schlosser, and especially by the rich finds of the American paleontologists Marsh, Cope, Leidy, Osborn, Ameghino, and others, that we have now obtained a satisfactory general insight into the rich development of this highest legion of mammals during the Tertiary period. With great admiration I have recently seen in London the instructive series of fossil primates which is displayed in the noble paleontological section of the museum of natural history in South Kensington, in which there is a gigantic fossil lemur which was nearly as large as a man, and which Forsyth Major recently discovered upon the island of Madagascar (Megaladapis madagascariensis).
Now, as in Cuvier's time, the most important differences between the two principal groups of true apes consists in the characters of the teeth. Man, like the Old-World apes, possesses thirty-two teeth of very characteristic structure and arrangement. The New-World apes have, on the contrary, thirty-six teeth, namely, one more premolar in each half Of either jaw. Comparative odontology is authorized to state on phylogenetic grounds that this number has arisen by reduction from a higher dental formula, from forty-four teeth; for this typical form of dentition (in each half jaw, above and below, three incisors, one canine, four premolars, and three molars) is common to all those
