Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/352

344 canis from modern Canes, or Pliocene horses from modern horses. If so, he would most undoubtedly be a man—genus Homo—even if you made him a distinct species. For my part, I should by no means be astonished to find the genus Homo represented in the Miocene, say, the Neanderthal man, with rather smaller brain capacity, longer arms and more movable great toe, but at most specifically different."

In his work 'On Man's Place in Nature' while referring to the other higher Quadrumana, Huxley dwelt principally on the chimpanzee and the gorilla, because, he said, "It is quite certain that the ape, which most nearly approaches man in the totality of its organization, is either the chimpanzee or the gorilla."

This is no doubt the case at present; but the gibbons (Hylobates), while differing more in size, and modified in adaptation to their more skilful power of climbing, must also be considered, and, to judge from Professor Dubois' remarkable discovery in Java of Pithecanthropus, which half the authorities have regarded as a small man, and half as a large gibbon, it is rather down to Hylobates than either the chimpanzee or the gorilla that we shall have to trace the point where the line of our far-away ancestors will meet that of any existing genus of monkeys.

Huxley emphasized the fact that monkeys differ from one another in bodily structure as much or more than they do from man.

We have Haeckel's authority for the statement that "after Darwin had, in 1859, reconstructed this most important biological theory, and by his epoch-making theory of natural selection placed it on an entirely new foundation, Huxley was the first who extended it to man; and, in 1863, in his celebrated three lectures on 'Man's Place in Nature' admirably worked out its most important developments."

The work was so well and carefully done that it stood the test of time, and, writing many years afterwards, Huxley was able to say, and to say truly, that:

"I was looking through 'Man's Place in Nature' the other day; I do not think there is a word I need delete, nor anything I need add except in confirmation and extension of the doctrine there laid down. That is great good fortune for a book thirty years old, and one that a very shrewd friend of mine implored me not to publish, as it would certainly ruin all my prospects" ('Life of Professor Huxley' p. 344).

He has told us elsewhere ('Collected Essays' vii., p. 11) that "it has achieved the fate which is the Euthanasia of a scientific work, of being inclosed among the rubble of the foundations of knowledge and forgotten." He has, however, himself saved it from the tomb, and built it into the walls of the temple of science, and it will still well repay the attention of the student.

For a poor man—I mean poor in money, as Huxley was all his life—