Page:The Last link.djvu/39

Rh descendant of apes.' He declares any intermediate form to be unimaginable save in a dream.

Virchow went to the Leyden Congress with the set purpose of disproving that the bones found by Dubois belonged to a creature which linked together apes and man. First, he maintained that the skull was that of an ape, while the thigh belonged to man. This insinuation was at once refuted by the expert palæontologists, who declared that without the slightest doubt the bones belonged to one and the same individual. Next, Virchow explained that certain exostoses or growths observable on the thigh proved its human nature, since only under careful treatment the patient could have healed the original injury. Thereupon Professor Marsh, the celebrated palæontologist, exhibited a number of thigh-bones of wild monkeys which showed similar exostoses and had healed without hospital treatment. As a last argument the Berlin pathologist declared that