Although they were written so long ago, the lectures on "Man's Place
in Nature" are still the best existing treatise on the subject, and we
shall give an outline of them, mentioning the chief points in which
further work has been done. Information concerning the man-like apes
was scattered in very different places, in the grave records of
scientific societies, in the letters of travellers and missionaries,
in the reports of the zooelogical societies which had been in
possession of living specimens. The facts had to be sifted out from a
great mass of verbiage and unfounded statement. With a characteristic
desire for historical accuracy, more usual in a man of letters than in
an anatomist, Huxley began with a study of classical and mediaeval
legends of the existence of pigmies and man-like creatures; but, while
recognising that legends of satyrs and fauns were presages of the
discovery of man-like apes, he was unable to find any actual record
earlier than that contained in Pigafetta's _Description of the Kingdom
of Congo_, drawn up from the notes of a Portuguese sailor and
published in 1598. The descriptions and figures in this work
apparently referred to chimpanzees. From this date onwards he traces
the literature of the animals in question, and then proceeds to give
an account of them.

There are four distinct kinds of man-like apes: in Eastern Asia the
Orangs and the Gibbons (although some later writers differ from Huxley
in removing the Gibbons from the group of anthropoids); in Western
Africa, the Chimpanzees and the Gorillas. All these have certain
characters in common. They are inhabitants of the old world; they all
have the same number of teeth as man, possessing four incisors, two
canines, four premolars, and six true molars in each jaw, in the adult
condition, while the milk dentition, as in man, consists of twenty
teeth,--four incisors, two canines, and four molars in each jaw. Since
Huxley wrote, a large bulk of additional work upon teeth has been
published, and we now know that man and the anthropoid apes display
the same kind of degenerative specialisation in their jaws. Simpler
and older forms of mammals had a much larger number of teeth, and
these differed among themselves more than the teeth of the higher
forms. In the Anthropoids and Man, the jaws are proportionately
shorter and less heavy than in simpler forms, and, in correspondence
with this, the number of the teeth has become reduced, while the t