Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/845

Rh from the insectivora is, however, in no way contradictory with descent from the marsupials. The primitive type of the latter was insectivorous in the Triassic and Jurassic epochs.

The last relation to be considered is that with the ungulates, concerning which we have the observation of M. Albert Gaudry. "I have asked myself," he says, in his "Tertiary Fossils," "if the lemurs had not a community of origin with many of the extinct pachyderms." The resemblances between recent lemurs and the ungulates, pointed out by MM. Alphonse Milne-Edwards and Grandidier in their great work on Madagascar, lend credibility to this opinion. Two genera are conformed to the idea: Adapis, the Parisian species of which, derived from the gypsums of the Upper Eocene of Montmartre, was classed by Cuvier among the pachyderms, but appears, judging by the teeth, the skull, and parts of the limbs, to be only a lemur; and the Aplelotherium, classed by Gervais also with the pachyderms, and now recognized as a lemur. The resemblance occurs among the Eocene species of the stock of recent perissodactyli, such as the Hyracotherium, the Lophiotherium, and the Pachynolophus.

Mr. Cope has also discovered several species of Adapis in the United States, and confirms these resemblances. It is, however, proper to remark that the genealogy leading to man is not in question in this matter. Mr. Cope divides the American fossil lemurs into three families: the Anaptomorphs, which lead, by two branches, one to the monkeys and the other to man; the Mixodectines, the outcome of which I do not know; and the Adapides, which lead to the ungulates. The branch of the Adapis is, therefore, according to Mr. Cope, foreign to the branch leading to man.

We shall shortly now abandon the eighteenth stage or the lemurs of Haeckel, to pass to the nineteenth, that of the catarrhinian apes, or rather to the monkeys as a whole.

The further I go, the more I am convinced that the anthropoids should be joined with the monkeys recognized by all under that name, and that they are only the highest family of them; and the more I am persuaded that they should be separated from man, looking at the matter from a morphological point of view, further than is admitted in a certain school; for the physiological or intellectual point of view is not for an instant discussable. The principal classifications of the primates are as follow:

Cuvier, two groups, man and the monkeys, the latter, under the name of quadrumana, being divided into apes, lemurs, and ouistitis, the first including what are called great apes or anthropoids.

Broca, in his last classification, which is only a variant of that of Linnæus—two groups: man and the anthropoids together; the monkeys, including those of the old continent or the pithecans, and those of the new continent or the cebians.