We do not need to look far among the lower animals for the species which come nearest to man in structure and which seem to have immediately preceded him in the line of descent. We find these forms in the monkeys or apes, and especially in their highest representatives, the anthropoid apes. These possess in a partial degree all the special characteristics of man. They are social in habit; some of them are semi-erect in posture, and their fore limbs partly freed from use in locomotion; they possess some imperfect means of vocal communication; they employ the mind to some extent in place of the body; in short, they seem arrested forms on the road from brute to man, signal-posts on the highway of evolution. In physical organization their approach to man is singularly close. In anatomy man and the higher apes are in most respects counterparts of each other. The principal anatomical distinction has been considered to be in the foot, which from the opposable character of the great toe was classed by Cuvier with the hand, the apes being named Quadrumana, or four-handed, and man Bimana, or two-handed. Fuller research has shown that this distinction does not exist, the foot of the ape being found to agree far more closely with the foot than with the hand of man. Estimated according to use, the hand is, in the whole order, the special prehensile organ; the foot, however prehensile it may be, is predominantly a walking organ. And the opposability of the great toe is approached in some men, who have great mobility in this organ, and can use it for grasping. In regard to the brain, the organ of the mind, the difference between the higher apes and man is almost solely one of comparative size, the lower intelligence of the apes being indicated by the smaller size of their brains. The largest ape brain is scarcely half the size of the smallest human brain. But anatomically they are nearly identical. All the structural features of the brain are common to both, and the details are largely filled out in the anthropoid apes, the convolutions being all present and the pattern of arrangement the same. The brain of the orang may be said to be like that of man in all respects except size and the greater symmetry of its convolutions, which are less complicated with minor convolutions than in man. In truth, the difference between the brains of man and the orang is almost insignificant as compared with the difference between those of the orang and the lowest apes. Mr. E. W. Taylor, who has recently made an exhaustive study of the minute anatomy of the brain of the chimpanzee, remarks, "The similarity between the brain of the anthropoid apes and of man is one of the most singular and interesting facts of which we have knowledge."