Page:The Geologist, volume 5.djvu/109

Rh what ancestry man may have been derived from such primordial form he knows not. Suffice it to say that it is neither to Gorilla, to Koo- loo Kamba, to Orang, to Dryopithecus, nor to any known recent or fossil ape he can claim his descent.

But the mind of the palæontologist, still aiming at a solution, re- calls the hideous ape-like character of the Neanderthal man, and strives to divest himself of the idea that this frightful being belonged to the same race as himself. Demonstration is lacking of the mode by which even so low and degraded a type could have been derived from the apes. Whether demonstration will ever afford us such a solution is the object towards which Anthropologists, Zoologists, and Geologists are directing their best endeavours,—with what success remains to be seen.

When we view the skeleton of man, when we trace the points of difference between his form and that of the anthropoid apes, we are struck with the "all-pervading" unity of plan and "similitude of structure,—every tooth, every bone strictly homologous,"—which is presented by these organs throughout their diversified adaptations. We can trace out in both the human jaw and that of the ape the same canine tooth: e.g. as the modified representative and homologue of the canine in Hyænodon, now subserving its duty in the gorilla as an almost carnassial laniary, now dwarfed in man into the semblance merely of a more conical incisor. In each bone of the metacarpals