Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/507

Rh from the original Type,' did not appear till 1858, a year after Professor Owen's classification of the mammalia, and as Darwin's 'Origin of Species' was not published till another year had elapsed, we cannot accept the explanation above offered to us of the causes which led the founder of the sub-class Archencephala to seek for new points of distinction between the human and simian brains; but the Dutch anatomists may have fallen into this anachronism by having just read, in the paper by Professor Owen in the Annals, some prefatory allusions to 'the Vestiges of Creation, ' [sic]Natural Selection, and the question whether man be or be not a descendant of the ape.'

The number of original and important memoirs to which this discussion on the cerebral relations of Man to the Primates has already given rise in less than five years, must render the controversy for ever memorable in the history of Comparative Anatomy.

In England alone, no less than fifteen genera of the Primates (the subjects having been almost all furnished by that admirable institution, the Zoological Gardens of London) have been anatomically examined, and they include nearly all the leading types of structure of the Old and New World apes and monkeys, from the most anthropoid form to that farthest removed from Man; in other words, from the Chimpanzee to the Lemur. These are—

Troglodytes (Chimpanzee).

Pithecus (Orang).

Hylobates (Gibbon).

Semnopithecus. Cercopithecus.

Macacus. Cynocephalus (Baboon).