Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/196

184 was a painting by Gabriel Max, of Munich, entitled Pithecanthropus europaeus alalus. This picture, which formed one of the chief attractions of the International Art Exhibition in the Crystal Palace at Munich, represents the "missing link" and his family, or the primitive semihuman European, as he may have "lived and loved" in the Pliocene period of the Tertiary epoch.

In this connection we may premise that Prof. Gabriel Max is not only a genial artist endowed with a rare power of portraying strong passions and intense emotions of the soul—joy, sorrow, enthusiasm, the ecstasy of the saint and the heroic resignation of the martyr, especially as reflected in the features of women—but also an amateur in anthropology and comparative anatomy. Among his recent works are several remarkable studies of apes, such as In Bad Humor (an angry simian mother correcting her child by pulling its ear). Three Sages (a trio of monkeys sitting before an open book), and especially the semi-satirical group of anthropoids as art critics now in the New Pinakothek at Munich.

Unlike these paintings, which are the result of long and careful observation of living models, the representation of the Pithecanthropus is a fancy sketch based upon scientific deductions from the theory of evolution. The scene lies in the primeval forest, where the female of the pithecoid progenitors of mankind is seated at the foot of a tree, nursing her infant. The hands show a marked advance toward humanity in their differentiation from the feet. Of existing apes the gorilla comes nearest to man in this respect, and is superior to all other quadrumanes in the power of standing erect and walking on its hind feet, but as a rule it goes on all fours. The Pithecanthropus, however, no longer creeps and grovels on the ground, but assumes with ease an upright posture, and, in the words of Racine, "élève un front noble et regards les cieux." Not only does this creature lift its brow and look at the sky, but, what is perhaps of still greater importance, he puts his foot down like a man, and, if he should chance to leave any "footprints on the sands of time," they would preserve distinct traces of five toes, whereas in the impressions made by the foot of the gorilla we can discover only marks of the ball of the foot and slight indications of the great toe. The same process of development is also perceptible in the formation of the limbs and in the lines of the face. The male, as he stands near the-fallen trunk of a tree, has quite straight legs—rather too straight, indeed, for Homo primigenius, who was undoubtedly knock-kneed and the calves are somewhat more fully developed than we should expect to find them in this early stage of transition from ape to man. The hair on the body has become thinner and that of the head has grown longer and more luxuriant, especially in the female. The skull, too, evidently covers a