Page:The American Journal of Science, series 4, volume 4.djvu/243

Rh London, Berlin and Jena. He will set forth, without doubt, in the near future the happy effects of that scientific tour upon anatomists when he describes the fossil fauna (Upper Pliocene) contemporaneous with the Pithecanthropus. The opinion adopted seems to be to-day very generally analogous to the one set forth at the beginning of this article.

It is the aspect of the specimens from Trinil and their complete fossilization, which surpasses by far that of all human remains, even the most ancient known until then, that tend more powerfully than all demonstration to place them as contemporaneous and as coming from one and the same individual, especially since there exists among them no want of anatomic correlation. The degree of fossilization is such that the femur attains the weight of 1 kilogram, whereas prehistoric femurs of the same size do not exceed 350 grains. All that, joined to the conditions of the deposit, adds value to the divers anatomic facts and deductions given above, and constitutes a mass of arguments before which it becomes difficult not to surrender. Without doubt, these diverse fossil pieces, which all present characters intermediate between the human and the simian morphology, these diverse portions of the skeleton which are all explained the one by the other, do not come from two or three different species which would have met in some way by