Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 32.djvu/516

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

ciation an exceedingly interesting paper on the "Habits of the Orang," as observed by him in his native forests. He says, "Each individual of the Borneo orangs differs from his fellows, and has as many facial peculiarities belonging to himself alone, as can be found in the individuals of any unmixed race of human beings." After recounting the many traits of the orang, heretofore regarded as peculiar to man, he says: "Let any one, who is prejudiced against Darwinian views, go to the forests of Borneo. Let him there watch from day to day this strangely human form in all its various phases of existence. Let him see it climb, walk, build its nest, eat and drink and fight like human 'roughs.' Let him see the female suckle her young and carry it astride her hip precisely as do the coolie women of Hindostan. Let him witness their human-like emotions of affection, satisfaction, pain, and childish rage—let him see all this, and then he may feel how much more potent has been the lesson than all he has read in pages of abstract ratiocination."

Professor W. S. Barnard several years ago, in a study of the myology of man and apes, showed that the scansorius muscle which Trail studied in the higher apes and which he supposed had no homologue in man, was really homologous with the gluteus minimus in man. Dr. Henry C. Chapman,[1] in a study of the structure of the orangoutang, has confirmed the truth of Barnard's discovery. Dr. Chapman is led to infer that the ancestral form of man was intermediate in character, as compared with living anthropoids or lower monkeys, agreeing with them in some respects and differing from them in others.

The osteological affinities which man has with the Lemuridæ, as insisted upon by Mivart, are also recognized by Cope.[2] In a general paper on the "Origin of Man and other Vertebrates," he says: "An especial point of interest in the phylogeny of man has been brought to light in our North American beds. There are some things in the structure of man and his nearest relatives, the chimpanzee, orang, etc., that leads us to suspect that they had rather come from some extinct type of lemurs."

It would seem as if we must look farther back than the higher apes for the converging lines of man's relations with them. The earliest remains of man or the apes found fossil, presenting as they do marked types with little tendency to approach one another, would in themselves suggest an earlier origin for both stocks.

In a paper by Professor Cope[3] on "Lemurine Reversion in Human Dentition," he says, in concluding his article: "It may be stated that the tritubercular superior molars of man constitute a reversion to the dentition of the Lemuridæ of the Eocene period of the family Anap-

  1. "Proceedings of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences," 1880, p. 163.
  2. "Popular Science Monthly," vol. xxvii, p. 609.
  3. "American Naturalist," vol. xx, p. 941.