), thanks to Selenka's most successful tour in the East Indies in
search of such material. We can now compare corresponding stages of
the lower monkeys and of the Anthropoid apes with human embryos, and
convince ourselves of their great resemblance to one another, thus
strengthening enormously the armour prepared by Darwin in defence of his
view on man's nearest relatives. It may be said that Selenka's material
fils up the blanks in Darwin's array of proofs in the most satisfactory
manner.

The deepening of our knowledge of comparative anatomy also gives us much
surer foundations than those on which Darwin was obliged to build. Just
of late there have been many workers in the domain of the anatomy of
apes and lemurs, and their investigations extend to the most different
organs. Our knowledge of fossil apes and lemurs has also become much
wider and more exact since Darwin's time: the fossil lemurs have been
especially worked up by Cope, Forsyth Major, Ameghino, and others.
Darwin knew very little about fossil monkeys. He mentions two or three
anthropoid apes as occurring in the Miocene of Europe ("Descent of
Man", page 240.), but only names Dryopithecus, the largest form from
the Miocene of France. It was erroneously supposed that this form was
related to Hylobates. We now know not only a form that actually stands
near to the gibbon (Pliopithecus), and remains of other anthropoids
(Pliohylobates and the fossil chimpanzee, Palaeopithecus), but also
several lower catarrhine monkeys, of which Mesopithecus, a form nearly
related to the modern Sacred Monkeys (a species of Semnopithecus) and
found in strata of the Miocene period in Greece, is the most important.
Quite recently, too, Ameghino's investigations have made us acquainted
with fossil monkeys from South America (Anthropops, Homunculus), which,
according to their discoverer, are to be regarded as in the line of
human descent.

What Darwin missed most of all--intermediate forms between apes
and man--has been recently furnished. (E. Dubois, as is well known,
discovered in 1893, near Trinil in Java, in the alluvial deposits of
the river Bengawan, an important form represented by a skull-cap, some
molars, and a femur. His opinion--much disputed as it has been--that in
this form, which he named Pithecanthropus, he has found a long-desired
transition-form is shared by the present writer. And although the
geological age of these fossils, which, according to Dubois, belong to