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In the diverse opinions of Dubois, Virchow, Nehring, Kollmann, Krause and others, we have almost an epitome of the present state of the Darwinian question. He held fast to his ceterum censeo: “As yet no diluvial discovery has been made which can be referred to a man of a pithecoid type.” Indeed, his polemic or “caution” in regard to the Theory of Descent went even further.
At most, they demonstrate the existence of a man whose skull may be said to revert somewhat towards the pithecoid type just as a Carrier, or a Pouter, or a Tumbler, may sometimes put on the plumage of its primitive stock, the 'Columba livia'. And indeed, though truly the most pithecoid of known human skulls, the Neanderthal cranium is by no means so isolated as it appears to be at first, but forms, in reality, the extreme term of a series leading gradually from it to the highest and best developed of human crania.
But he would have liked, at the same time, to keep the name of creation for a natural process which he imagined to be incomprehensible. And though he is evidently alarmed at the pithecoid origin of man involved in Lamarck's doctrine, he observes: "But, after all, what changes species may really undergo!
Of the skulls themselves, none were brachycephalous; on the contrary, they exhibit platyrrhine and in part decidedly pithecoid noses. When, on the 18th of March, 1897, I made a communication on the population of the Philippines, a bloody uprising had broken out everywhere against the existing Spanish rule.
In addition to valuable investigations of fossil-bearing beds in the Argentine, he made some excellent general suggestions, such as that the pithecoid apes, like the baboons, do not stand in the line of man's ancestral stem but represent a divergence from it away from humanity and toward a retrogressive bestialization.
As in single traits of development, so in the measurements, the difference and the debased character of this race obtrude themselves. Only, the nasal index is somewhat smaller; on the whole, the nose has in its separate parts a decidedly pithecoid form. People and Prospects of the Philippines
If we must speak of "reason" in connection with pithecoid primitive man, it can only be in the same sense as that in which we use the expression with reference to those other most highly developed Mammals, and the same remark holds true of the first beginnings of religion. It is indeed still not infrequently the custom to deny absolutely to the lower animals reason and religion.
"Finally, the comparatively large cranial capacity of the Neanderthal skull, overlaid though it may be by pithecoid bony walls, and the completely human proportions of the accompanying limb-bones, together with the very fair development of the Engis skull, clearly indicate that the first traces of the primordial stock whence Man has proceeded need no longer be sought, by those who entertain any form of the doctrine of progressive development, in the newest Tertiaries; but that they may be looked for in an epoch more distant from the age of the Elephas primigenius than that is from us."
If we had this unknown pithecoid stem-form before us, we should certainly put it in the order of the true apes in the primate system; but within this order we cannot, for the anatomic and ontogenetic reasons we have seen, separate man from the group of the anthropoid apes.
And she, lifting her glasses to her eyes from time to time to relish the doctor's beauty, talked with a pedantic slowness about protoplasms, and the reproduction of the cells, the cannibalisms of the phagocytes, catarine, anthropoid and pithecoid apes, discoplacentary mammals and the Pithecanthropos, treating the mysteries of life with friendly confidence, repeating strange scientific words, as if they were the names of society folks, who had dined with her the evening before.
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