Page:Smithsonian Report (1898).djvu/545

Rh great as that between bones of the same name in different but somewhat related species of mammals having a similar locomotion, as, for instance, Colobus and Semnopithecus, Cervus and Antilope. The most important difference concerns the form of the diaphyses in the popliteal region. It is much rounder than in man. The planum popliteum is therefore less extensive and more convex, so that exactly in its middle a kind of swelling extends as far as the neighborhood of the condyles. In the human femur the most projecting portion of the popliteal region is in the neighborhood of the lateral lip of the linea aspera. In the fossil femur, on the contrary, that lip is situated more on the lateral surface of the shaft.

After examining hundreds of human femora, Manouvrier could find only two that had a somewhat similar shape. It is therefore a very rare form in man. With the gibbon a similar form normally occurs, the median convexity in this species being, however, somewhat higher. This may be explained by the peculiar insertion of the femoral head of the biceps femoris that occurs in this species, it being attached in the middle line below the adductor magnus in close connection with the vastus interims. An extension of these conditions might, as Dr. Hepburn has pointed out to me, produce the median convexity of the entire popliteal region which we find in the fossil femur. In man the popliteal space becomes flattened by reason of the wide separation of the medial and lateral muscles in this region. In those isolated cases of a similar formation, found in an examination of hundreds of femora, there may have been a simian form of muscular attachment.

The exostosis of the fossil bone—considered by me as the result of a traumatic periostitis, and by Virchow as caused by a psoas abscess that had descended from along the spinal column—appears as a so-called tendinous or aponeurotic deposit of osseous tissue, such as occurs not very infrequently in man and is also to be seen, though in a less degree, on the humerus of the skeleton of an orang-outang in the Dresden Museum. This pathological formation has no significance as regards the systematic determination of the bones.

It has been generally allowed by everyone that the femur must have belonged to an animal that walked erect. The circumstances under which it was found, in the neighborhood of the skullcap, make it very highly probable that both belonged to the same individual; and now, since we have shown that the anthropoid skullcap may not have belonged to an ape, but possibly to a being that walked upright, this probability increases quite to certainty, for this reduces the deficiency in human characters which the skullcap showed when compared with the femur. The femur is not human in the usual sense, for it, as we have seen, shows features that occur only very seldom in human femora. Besides, the similarity of form may, as before stated, be sufficiently explained by a similarity of function, so that an entirely human form of femur need not necessarily have belonged to a man,