find no remains of man whatever. In a word, leaving romance and the three forests out of view, human bones have been found in caves in Germany, associated with the bones of mammalians now extinct; and of others that could only have existed under totally different climatic conditions; associated with the bones of the elephas primigenius, the cave bear, the urus, the mammoth, the hyæna, and the hairy rhinoceros, we find those wonderful flint axes, etc. All these facts were submitted to M. Cuvier in 1829, who denied their authenticity, and who would do so now were he alive.

Of the two skulls thus suddenly raised to importance,* one was found by M. Schmerling at Leipzig, in the cave of Engis, in 1833. Can this be the same Schmerling quoted by M. Knot? if so, the discovery is exactly thirty years old. The other skull, known as the Neanderthal skull, was found in a cave in the valley of that name, overlooking the Dussel, a tributary of the Rhine. In whose possession is the skull now?

CONCLUSION. The conclusion I arrive at is, that mankind forms one great family composed of various species. How these species originated we know not, and may never know. Man does not stand alone; but forms a portion of a serial of which many would have been lost, but which may be recovered by palæontological research. Some years ago (1821) I was conversing with M. Cuvier in his private library attached to the Museum, when an assistant of the Museum brought him a specimen of a fossil but just received. He gazed at it for a few moments with profound attention, and seemed lost in thought. On remarking to him that I was not aware that the fossil remains of animals placed so high in the scale by naturalists, had ever been found, before the specimen in his hand in a fossiliferous stratum of the earth, he observed to me that the specimen before us was the first, but would not be the last; still higher were sure to come. And so they have come; the quadrumana, as they are incorrectly named, have been since found in abundance in strata of great antiquity, to be followed, no doubt, by man himself.

And now, if we put faith in the researches of Bone, Knot, Donati, and others, fossil man has been found, or at least human remains in localities implying that the men to whom these remains belonged

The idea promulgated lately, that in human civilization there were a stone, bronze, and iron epoch or periods (Lancet, Feb. 16, 1862), has no real foundation in facts. The three forests (the author seems fond of the number three; numbers strike the imagination of a popular class)—the three forests were found in Denmark buried under the soil, offer no new facts as to the antiquity of man on the globe.

were coeval with those animals we call fossil and which are at all events, now extinct. They belonged then to a prior geological epoch -an epoch past and gone. The centres of creation which gave them birth no longer exist, and other seas, continents, and islands, usurp their place. Most of their animal and vegetable products have perished with them; the cataclysm might be sudden or slow, but progressive, and sure to end in one way, namely, the extinction of the forms of life appertaining to that centre of creation. When slow, it might, and no doubt did happen, that some portions of the fauna and flora did escape immediate destruction by finding a refuge on islands and other lands beyond the range of the catastrophe; but as the external circumstances, summed up by Hippocrates under the terms of "earth, air, and waters," were different and hostile to that form of life, so the remains of these forms of life gradually and slowly but surely perish. When the Spaniards first discovered the Canary isles, they found them in possession of a race of men quite distinct from all others. They had a civilization of their own, and certain usages slightly approaching the ancient Egyptians'. Whence came these people, and how was it that they remained isolated, as it were, from the rest of mankind? The theory to explain the phenomena I long ago proposed and now repeat, was this:-The centre of creation to which the Guanches belonged, and of which they formed a part, no longer exists; it formed a zone or belt across the African continent, extending westward into the Atlantic and eastward across Egypt and the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean; the seas now cover a large portion of that zone, and the desert of Zahara represents another part which, after having been submerged, has again risen from beneath the waves. The Guanches, then, were a race affiliated to that whose architectural remains still astonish the world-the Copt. The same theory seems to me applicable to the Aztecs and the supposed aborigines of the American continent. They were not the aborigines, but races belonging to other centres of creation, and would have perished in time had no European ever set foot on the continent. It applies also to the Maori of New Zealand, to the Tasmanian and Australian, to the natives of the Andaman isles, to the Basques, the Phoenicians, and no doubt to many others.

Neither climate, nor accidental deviation from the normal structure, nor hybridity, seems equal to the production of various races, unless we assume an antiquity to man including one or more geological epochs. Now this, by far the most probable, view remains yet to be proved. My firm belief is and always has been, that the proofs will some day be found. What we call the history of man is a mere delusion—a mere

speck when compared with the pre-historic period. That man has lived through many great changes on the surface of the earth is not a theory of the present day; the opinion seems to have been held by philosophic observers of an early age. Thus, Mohamed-born Mohamed Kaswini, of a race, as his name implies, by no means remarkable for a tendency to scientific pursuits, thus expresses himself. Mohamed seems to have lived in the seventh age of the Hegira, i. e., towards the close of the thirteenth of our era. He wrote a book on the wonders of nature, and in it he thus expresses himself.

6

"In passing one day by a very ancient and extremely populous city, I asked of one of the inhabitants who founded their city?' He replied to me, I know not, and our ancestors knew no more than we do on this point.' Five hundred years afterwards, passing by the same place, I could not perceive a trace of the city. Inquiring of one of the peasants about the place, when it was that the city was destroyed;' he answered me, what an odd question you put to me, this country has never been otherwise than as you see it now.' I returned there after another five hundred years, and I found in the place of the country I had seen—a sea. I now asked of the fishermen, 'how long it was since their country became a sea,' and he replied, that a person like me ought to know that it had always been a sea.' I returned again after five hundred years; the sea had disap. peared and it was now dry land; no one knew what had become of the sea, or if such a thing had ever existed. Finally, I returned once more after another five hundred years, and I again found a flourishing city. The people told me that the origin of their city was lost in the night of time."

These are some of the revolutions to which the living world has been in all times exposed; it is almost needless to say, that they depend on physical and material causes, and are the natural effects of influences set in motion by the inherent qualities of matter.

ON THE APPLICATION OF THE ANATOMICAL METHOD TO THE DISCRIMINATION OF SPECIES.

BY THE LATE R. KNOX, M.D., F.R.S.E.

(From the Medical Times and Gazette, March 14th, 1863.)

THE discovery of true descriptive anatomy, and its application to all classes of the zoological kingdom, led the illustrious Cuvier to the discovery of the fossil world. Many distinguished observers had

previously, no doubt, made some happy conjectures respecting the antiquity of the fossil world, and the advantages to be derived from the application of the anatomical method in the discrimination of species. Daubenton, Vicq d'Azyr, and Pinel, in France; Pallas, Blumenbach, and others, in Germany; Hunter, in England, had long prior to the era of Cuvier discovered and appreciated the utility of anatomical inquiry in zoology; but the credit of having placed this method on a new basis, and of having demonstrated by its means the true nature of the fossil world, belongs, unquestionably, to Cuvier. As many observations and hypotheses have been ascribed erroneously to this illustrious man, and more especially in England, it seems best to ascertain in the first place his own opinions of the value of the method he had discovered.

In the fossil world, those external characters by which an animal species is at once discriminated from all others, had been, with but few exception, wholly destroyed. I allude more especially to the animals we call mammals; and thus, if the species of these fossil animals were to be discovered at all, it could only be done through their osteological remains, including the teeth. The plan succeeded admirably, and led to the most astounding discoveries by Cuvier. As was to be expected, it threw the Linnean method into the shade, and all but extinguished the reputation of the greatest naturalist of any age, the Count de Buffon. It led Cuvier imperceptibly, and seemingly, without his being aware of it, to the adoption of some theories or hypotheses still maintained in England, but abandoned everywhere else. One of these was the attempt to prove distinct epochs of zoological formations, called in this country "creations," a word never used by Cuvier. As a strictly scientific man, he strenuously opposed the philosophical ideas of Goethe and his school, declaring them to be pantheistic, and not scientific; he denied an animal series, and refused to intercalate the extinct with the living world. Species he held to be unchangeable, under every circumstance, and, drawing his proofs from monumental and written records, he showed. that the living animal kingdom had remained unaltered since the earliest historic period. To man and to the now living world he ascribed a late origin, as compared with the fossil and extinct. Shortly before his death his theory of the fixity of species was called in question by Goethe and Geoffroy St. Hilaire; the animal serial was demonstrated by De Blainville, and the fossil intercalated with the living world; the metamorphosis of forms was proved, beyond all dispute, by embryogeny, and the philosophic and transcendental

theories of Goethe came to be accepted for scientific truths, and embryonic forms were supposed to pourtray the extinct or fossil world. But even Cuvier himself was aware that anatomical characters could not in every instance characterize species; and he instanced the genus Equus, or natural family of the horse, whose species cannot be distinguished from each other by the anatomical method; he might have mentioned many others. How is it with the natural family of man-with mankind?

As most natural zoological families show affiliations with other families, and do not stand alone, it seems proper to inquire, in the first instance, into the relation of mankind with other kinds, that is, other families of animals. Notwithstanding a tolerably strong resemblance between man and the animals usually, but erroneously, as I think, called quadrumana, or four-handed, there is a sharplydefined and deep gulf between these two great natural families. They differ remarkably in their external characters, and equally so in their osteological; and, although it be true that the brain in these two classes is almost identical in its forms, and that the retina in the apes of the old continent, has the foramen of Soemmering, a structure, perhaps, peculiar to man, there is yet enough to show that it requires many natural families to bridge over the gulf which exists beween them, or, in other words, to fill up the serial. Now, the researches of De Blainville lead us to conjecture, with every show of probability, that the wanting links will be supplied herafter-1. By palæontological discoveries of animals lower than man, yet above the apes; or, 2. By the formation of other species in the course of time, when the existing order of things shall have passed away, following the fate of all its predecessors.

The determination of distinct species in mankind can be made only on the same principles we employ in determining species in other natural families. The characters are either external or anatomical. We have seen that the anatomical method failed in Cuvier's hands when applied to the natural family Equus, and De Blainville showed that it also failed in many other instances. Should it fail when applied to man, I shall not be in the least surprised; for, although it be certain, as I think, that the internal structures differ essentially in every species from all others, yet it is obvious that such differences are

The most modern examples of fossil anthropoid ape with which we are acquainted are the Dryopithecus and Pliopithecus of the Miocene, probably allied to the existing Hylobates. The forms which are discovered in the newer or Pliocene beds are allied to the Semnopitheci and Macaci of India. Borneo and the Gaboon have not yet been geologically surveyed. (ED. Anthropo. Review.)