Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/211

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that some four years ago Mr. Dawson noticed that a road had been recently mended by peculiar flints, and on tracing them to their source, he found that the laborers had dug out an object looking like a cocoa-nut, which they had thrown on a rubbish heap. This proved to be part of a human skull, and excavations of the undisturbed gravel where it was found discovered part of the jaw bone. A somewhat absurd cablegram was sent the newspapers in this country reporting the discovery of a fossil man who could reason before he could speak. But it is the case that the cranium is on the whole human in its characteristics, while the jaw tends to be simian.

A restoration of the jaw by Dr. W. P. Pycraft, of the British Museum, is here given, and a more fanciful reconstruction of the primitive man, drawn under his direction by Mr. Forestier for the Illustrated London News. The remains were found on a plateau 80 feet above the river bed, to which extent denudation had taken place since the gravel was formed. In it were also found the remains of extinct mammals and many water-worn, iron-stained flint artifacts, to which the term eoliths has been applied. The gravel is early pleistocene, near enough to pliocene to make it almost certain that the immediate ancestors of the pleistocene man must have lived during that period.

The cranium is fragmentary, but typically human, with a capacity of over a thousand cubic centimeters, indicating a brain about four fifths that of the average European and twice as large as that of the highest apes. The. bones are remarkably thick and the temporal muscles extend higher up on the skull than in any recent or fossil man. The jaw bears some resemblance to the Heidelberg jaw, but it is less massive, with a still more negative chin and other simian features. As restored it is much like that of the chimpanzee. Dr. Woodward regards the remains as belonging not only to a hitherto unknown species, but has erected for it a new genus to which the name Eoanthropus dawsoni has been given. Recent discoveries prove that primitive man at a period from one hundred thousand to a million years ago was widely spread over Europe and apparently as far as Java, and that different species and perhaps genera may have lived simultaneously in different regions.

has sent a special message to the congress recommending the repeal of the law passed on February 15 of last year prohibiting the killing of seals on the Pribilof Islands for five years. His recommendation and that of the experts of the government should certainly be followed by the congress. A clear statement of the whole situation, drawn up by Dr. David Starr Jordan and Mr. G. A. Clark, has been recently given out by the Bureau of Fisheries of the Department of Commerce and Labor. The Pribilof Islands in Bering Sea came into the possession of the United States in 1867, and our