Page:The American Journal of Science, series 4, volume 4.djvu/250

226 saw, for it is morphologically intermediate, by its skull, between the lowest human races and the anthropoid type. A partisan of the theory of evolution has no repugnance to considering that race as human and to saying "the man of Trinil," since, according to the theory, the chain AD is necessarily uninterrupted. Whatever be the names that we shall judge proper to give to the divers links of this chain, it will be a question always of man more or less inferior as far as the point where, the type of "bipède marcheur" disappearing, we shall emerge from the definite family of Hominidæ to enter into another branch of the genealogic tree of Man.

If it is preferred to settle the question by saying that the skull of Trinil simply puts back the limit L beyond its present position, just as the skulls of Spy have extended this limit as regards the races of Europe: from what I have just said I should not see the slightest objection to that, since it seems to me this limit L is destined to be put back by successive degrees as far as to the level A.

Theoretically it is highly probable that an anthropomorphous species, evolving toward the human type, ought to have realized at first in the adult state the characters of superiority that it possessed transitorily in the young state before that evolution. The disappearance of these infantile characters of superiority results, as I have shown in a former memoir, from the precocious arrest of development in the cerebral mantel, when the central and inferior encephalic region as well as the basilar region of the skull continue to grow, keeping pace with the general development of the body. The Pithecanthropus would represent then that inferior phase of human evolution in which the intellectual and cerebral improvement would have been just enough so that the development of the upper portion of the skull would not be left in arrears any more than it is in the young anthropoid compared to the basilar development correlative to the corporeal growth in general. Among the lowest existing human races, this stage of evolution is largely exceeded for the normal individual. The difference is yet greater for the average among European races.

At any rate, the quality of precursor attributed by Mr. Dubois to his Pithecanthropus reposes upon an ensemble of facts of consequence enough to merit the most serious attention. In addition, behind this hypothesis there arises another to the view of the evolutionist. It is quite natural to propose the question whether the precursor were not something more, that is to say an immediate ancestor of man or of a part of the human species.