Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/846

826 Huxley, in his last classification—three groups: man, the monkeys, and the lemurs, the monkeys being divided into the catarrhinians, platyrrhinians, and arctopithecans; and the catarrhinians subdivided into the anthropomorphous and the cynomorphous apes.

Vogt, in his "Mammalia"—first group, man, which we mention here, but which is not treated of; second group, the monkeys of the old continent, divided into anthropomorphous or tailless monkeys, and monkeys with tails; third group, the monkeys of the new continent, divided into platyrrhinians and arctopithecoids; and fourth group, the lemurs or prosimians.

From this we see that, with the exception of Broca, all these authors agree in uniting the great apes or anthropoids under the term apes, or catarrhinian apes, or apes of the old continent; and that Huxley and Vogt agree with Cuvier, Broca, too, may not be so isolated as I have represented him. We should recollect that he never formulated his division as above, but that it is the incontestable result of his teachings, and especially of those of his later years.

I have been led by my own studies, and resting on the differences that appear between man and the monkeys, great and small, drawn from the volume of the brain, the cranial characteristics which are the consequences of it, the facial traits that accompany it, and the characters of the skeleton which are developed in a parallel way—that is, from all the characteristics which I have especially studied—to abandon the classification of Linnæus and take up the one so much decried of Cuvier, against which no serious reproach has been brought except that of the use of the word quadrumanous and the narrow definition of the hand on which its rests. Cuvier may not have been much of a philosopher, but he was first among observers.

When Broca contested the application of the denomination quadrumanous to the monkeys to distinguish them from man, bimanous, he rested on the fact that the presence or absence of the thumb is not enough to authorize the names of hand and foot; that in man, every superior member concurs in the function of prehension, of which the extremity of the member is the immediate organ, while in the inferior member everything is organized with a view to the functions of locomotion and support which the extremity only seems destined to fulfill; in short, that there is a solidarity between all the parts of either limb, the various details of which constitute the characteristics of the functions of hand and foot. This is admirably true, as to man, at the summit of the evolutionary series of which he is the crowning. It ought to be true, too, when we descend the course of the series.

The fore-limbs of the monkeys are indeed adapted to the