Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/110

92 proportions the Neanderthal skeleton does not differ from the ordinary standard, so that the skeleton by no means indicates a transition between Homo and Pithecus.

There is doubtless, as shown in the diagram fig. 4, a nearer resemblance in the outline of the Neanderthal skull to that of a chimpanzee than had ever been observed before in any human cranium; and Professor Huxley's description of the occipital region shows that the resemblance is not confined to the mere excessive prominence of the superciliary ridges.

The direct bearing of the ape-like character of the Neanderthal skull on Lamarck's doctrine of progressive development and transmutation, or on that modification of it which has of late been so ably advocated by Mr. Darwin, consists in this, that the newly observed deviation from a normal standard of human structure is not in a casual or random direction, but just what might have been anticipated if the laws of variation were such as the transmutationists require. For if we conceive the cranium to be very ancient, it exemplifies a less advanced stage of progressive development and improvement. If it be a comparatively modern race, owing its peculiarities of conformation to degeneracy, it is an illustration of what the botanists have called 'atavism,' or the tendency of varieties to revert to an ancestral type, which type, in proportion to its antiquity, would be of lower grade. To this hypothesis, of a genealogical connection between man and the lower animals, I shall again allude in the concluding chapters.