aterial. We can now compare
corresponding stages of the lower monkeys and of the Anthropoid apes
with human embryos, and convince ourselves of their great resemblance
to one another, thus strengthening enormously the armour prepared by
Darwin in defence of his view on man's nearest relatives. It may be
said that Selenka's material fills up the blanks in Darwin's array of
proofs in the most satisfactory manner.

The deepening of our knowledge of comparative anatomy also gives us much
surer foundations than those on which Darwin was obliged to build. Just of
late there have been many workers in the domain of the anatomy of apes and
lemurs, and their investigations extend to the most different organs. Our
knowledge of fossil apes and lemurs has also become much wider and more
exact since Darwin's time: the fossil lemurs have been especially worked up
by Cope, Forsyth Major, Ameghino, and others. Darwin knew very little about
fossil monkeys. He mentions two or three anthropoid apes as occurring in
the Miocene of Europe,[111] but only names _Dryopithecus_, the largest form
from the Miocene of France. It was erroneously supposed that this form was
related to _Hylobates_. We now know not only a form that actually stands
near to the gibbon (_Pliopithecus_), and remains of other anthropoids
(_Pliohylobates_ and the fossil chimpanzee, _Palaeopithecus_), but also
several lower catarrhine monkeys, of which _Mesopithecus_, a form nearly
related to the modern Sacred Monkeys (a species of _Semnopithecus_) and
found in strata of the Miocene period in Greece, is the most important.
Quite recently, too, Ameghino's investigations have made us acquainted with
fossil monkeys from South America (_Anthropops_, _Homunculus_), which,
according to their discoverer, are to be regarded as in the line of human
descent.

What Darwin missed most of all--intermediate forms between apes and
man--has been recently furnished. E. Dubois, as is well known,
discovered in 1893, near Trinil in Java, in the alluvial deposits of
the river Bengawan, an important form represented by a skull-cap, some
molars, and a femur. His opinion--much disputed as it has been--that
in this form, which he named _Pithecanthropus_, he has found a
long-desired transition-form is shared by the present writer. And
although the geological age of these fossils, which, according to
Dubois, belong to the uppermost Tertiary series, the Pliocene has
recently been fixed at a later date (t