of gout in old age, as well as of
injuries, it nevertheless can not have been changed in its _fundamental
form_ by any sickness, even according to Virchow. This very skull now
indisputably shows a still lower formation, which, although quite
essentially different from the type of the ape, stands nearer to it than is
the case with the skulls of men in later times. Of a later date, and of a
correspondingly higher form, are the skull of Engis, of Cannstatt, the
skulls of the Belgian caves (especially Chauvaux), of France, and of
Gibraltar. According to the weighty authority of Schaaffhausen (note his
opening address at the Wiesbaden Congress of the {86} Anthropological
Society, 1873), the skulls and the remaining parts of the skeleton show
more indications of a lower formation the older they are. He especially
calls attention to a certain bone of the roof of the skull--the _Os
interparietale_ or the so-called _Os Incae_--which has only recently been
recognized as a characteristic of a lower formation of skulls, standing
nearer to that of animals. As late as the summer of 1873, two human
skeletons were found at Coblenz in a volcanic sand, of which Schaaffhausen
says: "No less than eight anatomic marks of a lower formation, which
probably have not heretofore been found together, indicate the great age of
these remains." With all these traces of a difference between the former
and the present state of the physical condition of man, the differences
between the type of man and that of the animal are still great enough to
leave wide open the possibility of the origin of man through some other
means than that of gradual development. On the other hand, it is more or
less in favor of the evolution idea, that so far such old remains of man
have been found in places which certainly can not have been the cradle of
mankind, and that those parts of the earth which we would naturally suppose
to be the first dwelling place of the earliest human genera have been
little or not at all investigated. And also the hypothesis of Haeckel, that
the cradle of mankind was a land between Africa and Asia, now sunk in the
sea, and called Lemuria, can be neither proved nor denied. Such vague
possibilities have indeed not the least scientific value.

In considering these contradictory results of geological investigation, we
dare not overlook three points: First, our knowledge of the crust of the
globe is still {87} very fragmentary, and does not yet extend