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If Professor Bischoff had taken the trouble to refer to p. 96 of the work he criticises, in fact, he would have found the following passage: "And it is a remarkable circumstance that though, so far as our present knowledge extends, there IS one true structural break in the series of forms of Simian brains, this hiatus does not lie between man and the manlike apes, but between the lower and the lowest Simians, or in other words, between the Old and New World apes and monkeys and the Lemurs.
In the lower Monkeys and in the Lemurs the difference becomes more striking still, the pelvis acquiring an altogether quadrupedal character. But now let us turn to a nobler and more characteristic organ that by which the human frame seems to be, and indeed is, so strongly distinguished from all others, I mean the skull.
The first tribe, taking the cases in their order of succession, to which the visitor's attention will be attracted on passing from the cases of lemurs, is
As he had therefore not yet said "How do you do," I failed to fathom his reasons for wanting to say "good-bye." However, far be it from me to deny any one innocent pleasure, so I gravely bade him good-bye, and he disappeared into the howling wilderness whence he had come. One afternoon we came upon two lemurs seated gravely side by side on a horizontal limb ten feet up a thorn tree.
This pressure has finally culminated in forcing the sacrum of the European nearer the pubes, with consequent lateral expansion and contraction of the diameter from front to back. From the marsupials to the lemurs the box-shaped pelvis remains.
The sloth, indeed, is specially adapted in organization to an arboreal residence, but this change is individual, not tribal, this animal being an aberrant form of the ground-dwelling edentata. In the apes and lemurs, on the contrary, the ground-dwellers are the aberrant forms, stray wanderers from the host.
And as to the foot, the great toe of the Marmoset is still more insignificant in proportion than that of the Orang while in the Lemurs it is very large, and as completely thumb-like and opposable as in the Gorilla but in these animals the second toe is often irregularly modified, and in some species the two principal bones of the tarsus, the 'astragalus' and the 'os calcis', are so immensely elongated as to render the foot, so far, totally unlike that of any other mammal.
Whether the monkeys emerged from the lemurs or the two groups developed side by side is a question as yet unsettled; at all events they are closely similar in conditions of existence. Yet while the monkeys are the most intelligent and teachable of animals, the lemurs are among the least intelligent of the mammalia.
The next two cases contain specimens of the lemurs, more familiarly known as Madagascar monkies. Of these the flying lemur is the most remarkable species. Specimens of this species are grouped in the lower part of the cases; they are from the Indian Archipelago; and in the texture of their skin and the loose and light way in which it connects their limbs, they resemble bats.
In order to give the proper perspective, it will be well to state at the present juncture, first, that the various kinds of men do not vary from each other in a chance manner so as to show all possible types and varieties, but that they fall into natural groups or families distinguished by certain common characteristics, just as do all other kinds of species of animals; in the second place, it appears that some of the differences between the races denoted higher on structural accounts and the lowest forms of man are of the same nature as those observed in the review of the various species of primates from the lemurs to man.
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