What can we deduce from this with regard to our own genealogy? Man has just the same characters, the same form of dentition, auditory passage, and nose, as all the Catarrhines; in this he radically differs from the Platyrrhines. We are thus forced to assign him a position among the eastern apes in the order of Primates, or at least place him alongside of them. But it follows that man is a direct blood relative of the apes of the Old World, and can be traced to a common stem-form together with all the Catarrhines. In his whole organisation and in his origin man is a true Catarrhine; he originated in the Old World from an unknown, extinct group of the eastern apes. The apes of the New World, or the Platyrrhines, form a divergent branch of our genealogical tree, and this is only distantly related at its root to the human race. We must assume, of course, that the earliest Eocene apes had the full dentition of the Platyrrhines; hence we may regard this stem-group as a special stage (the twenty-sixth) in our ancestry, and deduce from it (as the twenty-seventh stage) the earliest Catarrhines. We have now reduced the circle of our nearest relatives to the small and comparatively scanty group that is represented by the sub-order of the Catarrhines; and we are in a position to answer the question of man's place in this sub-order, and say whether we can deduce anything further from this position as to our immediate ancestors. In answering this question the comprehensive and able studies that Huxley gives of the comparative anatomy of man and the various Catarrhines in his Man's Place in Nature are of great assistance to us. It is quite clear from these that the differences between man and the highest Catarrhines (gorilla, chimpanzee, and orang) are in every respect slighter than the corresponding differences between the highest and the lowest Catarrhines (white-nosed monkey, macaco, baboon, etc.). In fact, within the small group of the tail-less anthropoid apes the differences between the various genera are not less than the differences between them and man. This is seen by a glance at the skeletons that Huxley has put together (Figures 2.278 to 2.282). Whether we take the skull or the vertebral column or the ribs or the fore or hind limbs, or whether we extend the comparison to the muscles, blood-vessels, brain, placenta, etc., we always reach the same result on impartial examination--that man is not more different from the other Catarrhines than the extreme forms of them (for instance, the gorilla and baboon) differ from each other. We may now, therefore, complete the Huxleian law we have already quoted with the following thesis: "Whatever system of organs we take, a comparison of their modifications in the series of Catarrhines always leads to the same conclusion; the anatomic differences that separate man from the most advanced Catarrhines (orang, gorilla, chimpanzee) are not as great as those that separate the latter from the lowest Catarrhines