Diversions of a NaturalistLankester, E. Ray (Edwin Ray), Sir
History
Diversions of a Naturalist
Lankester, E. Ray (Edwin Ray), Sir
Natural history
In the human jaw A we see behind the narrow front border _a_ the large
semicircular excavations for the attachment of the digastric muscles
right and left. They pass from here to the hyoid bone. From the spine
(double in origin) between the two digastric impressions passes a pair
of muscular slips, called the genio-hyoid muscles, also to the hyoid
bone, and from the pair of spines marked _y_ a pair of muscles, called
the genio-glossals, pass to the tongue. These inferior and superior
mental spines and the digastric impressions, much smaller in size than
in man, are seen in the chimpanzee's jaw, C, but are rubbed or partly
broken and partly rubbed away in the Piltdown half-jaw, B. In the
figures A and C the size of the digastric impressions and mental spines
is exaggerated, but their relatively much greater size in man than in
the chimpanzee is correctly given, and this greater size is connected
with the greater control of the tongue and the floor of the mouth in
man, possibly connected with speech.
_Reference Letters._--a, Broad, upwardly and forwardly sloping surface,
reduced in man; b, lower border of the jaw-bone; x, front margin of the
digastric "impression" of the right side. Dig, digastric impression;
y, superior mental spine of the left side; Fr., fractured edge of the
Piltdown jaw, and corresponding region in that of the chimpanzee.]
So long as the Neanderman was the sole indication of a creature nearer
in some features to the apes than are any living or extinct races of
the species Homo sapiens, the view was possible that the two stocks
which to-day blossom and display themselves--the one as the human
race, the other as the man-like apes (gorilla, chimpanzee, orang, and
gibbons), became separated from one another in long past geologic ages,
and that they have undergone each an independent development from a
creature so unlike both as seen to-day, that we cannot speak of it
as a missing link or a link at all. That view must be considerably
modified by the discovery of the Piltdown jaw--the jaw of Eoanthropus
Dawsoni--which is not that of a "man," that is not of the genus
Homo, but must, in my judgment, be considered as one of the family
Hominidæ--a Hominid, as we may say--a species assigned to a new
genus Eoanthropus by Smith Woodward, which is grouped with the genus
Homo and the ill-defined genus Pithecanthropus, to form the family
Hominidæ; just as the genera Gorilla, Anthropopithecus (chimpanzee),
Simia (orang), and Hylobates (gibbon) are grouped together to form
the family Simiidæ. In Eoanthropus we have in our hands, at last, the
much-talked-of "missing link"--the link obviously connecting man, the
genus Homo, with the apes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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