factious that are the true "footprints of the Creator," the immediate testimonials of the historical succession of the numerous groups of forms which have peopled this earthly hall for so many millions of years. Do petrifactions of the primates give us any determinate points of support for the above-mentioned pithecometric law? Do they directly confirm the much disputed "descent of man from apes"? According to our view, this question must be undoubtedly answered in the affirmative. Certainly the negative gaps which we here, as elsewhere, find in paleontological knowledge are very much to be regretted, and immediately in the primate stem they are, since most of these animals lived upon trees, greater than in any other groups of animals. But to offset these wide, empty spaces we have on the other hand a continually increasing number of positive facts, and these recently discovered petrifactions have a phylogenetic value that can not be overestimated. The most important and interesting of these petrifactions of the primates is the renowned Pithecanthropus erectus, which Eugène Dubois found in Java in 1894. As this pliocene ape man brought out a lively discussion at the last zoological congress held three years ago at Leyden, I may be permitted to say a few words in criticism of it.
From the proceedings of the congress at Leyden (at which I was not present), I learn that the most distinguished anatomists and zoologists expressed different views as to the nature of this remarkable Pithecanthropus. Its remains, a skullcap, a femur, and some teeth, were so incomplete that it was not possible to arrive at a conclusive judgment regarding them. The final result of the long and spirited debate held on this subject was that among twelve distinguished authorities three declared the fossil remains to be those of a man, three that they were those of an ape. Six or more other zoologists, on the contrary, stated what I believe to be the real fact, that they are the fossil remains of a form intermediate between ape and man. In fact the ordinary rules of logic seem to me to justify this conclusion. The Pithecanthropus erectus of Dubois is in fact a relic of that extinct group intermediate between man and ape to which as long ago as in 1886 I gave the name of Pithecanthropus. He is the long-sought "missing link" in the chain of the highest primates.
The able discoverer of Pithecanthropus erectus, Eugène Dubois, has not only convincingly pointed out his high significance as a "missing link," but has also shown in a very acute manner the relations which this intermediate form has on the one side to the lower races of man- kind, on the other hand to the various known races of anthropoid apes, as well as to the hypothetical stem form common to this entire group of Primaria or Anthropomorpha. This common stem form Dubois calls Protohylobates (primitive gibbon). It has essentially the same structure as we find in the gibbon of today (Hylobates) in southern Asia, and as the fossil Pliopithecus, whose petrified remains have been found in the Mid-Tertiary mountains of middle Europe (in the Upper Miocene
