![]() He conceived man as gradually elevating himself from an animal condition in which his mind is immersed in matter to a state in which mind acts independent of body. His views about the origin of society and language, and the faculties by which man is distinguishes from the brutes, are in some interesting ways similar to those of Darwin. He traced the gradual elevation of man to the social state as a natural process determined by "the necessities of human life." He looked on language (which he said is not "natural" to man in the sense of being necessary to his self-preservation) as a consequence of his social state. He regarded man as of the same "species" as the orang-utan. highest living apes, made reasonable speculations (based on wide study of anthropology and ancient philosophy) as to the passage from the monkey to man. X in A is the bony chin or "mental eminence" in B and C it marks that part of the jaw which would become the mental protuberance were the palisade or line of teeth retracted as in A. ![]() The dotted outline in B represents the part which was wanting in the original specimen and was thus re-constructed by Dr. The size of the drawings is two-thirds of the linear dimensions of the actual specimens. 23.≬omparison of the right half of the lower jaw of A, Modern European B., Eoanthropus from Piltdown and C. Lord Monboddo, in the absence of any knowledge of a "missing link" or of animals intermediate between man and theįig. A learned and able writerthe Scotch judge, Lord Monboddoin the later half of the eighteenth century put forward a theory of the development of mankind from apes such as the orang, quite independently of any general theory of "transformism" or of the progressive development of the animal and vegetable worlds, from simple beginnings. Sir Charles Lyell in 1851 made use of the term in regard to extinct animals which were intermediate in structure between two existing types. ![]() Old writers before the days of Darwin had talked and written about the "missing link," though I cannot say who first used the term in reference to a creature intermediate between man and apes. The public was warned that they must not jump to such a conclusion it was too obvious, too facile The "celebrated ape of the Darwin shape" which popular songs made familiar to a wide public, was declared to be only a remote rustic, not to say brutalized, cousin of humanity, not in the direct line happily! Our real ancestors, it was declared, were mild, intelligent little creatures, animals, it is true, but animals which hastened to separate their mixed qualities in two divergent lines of descent(1) the intelligent, mild-mannered clan who ceased to climb trees, and walked uprightly on the soles of their feet, whilst their teeth grew smaller and smaller, and their brains grew bigger ant bigger and (2) the violent tree-climbing members of the family, who refused to stand up, and acquired bigger and bigger jaws and teeth, whilst their brains remained small, their temper morose, and their conduct violent. It was insisted that the obvious and immediate suggestion when once man's descent from animal ancestry was admitted, namely, that man has taken his rise from the most man-like animals we knowthe great apes is erroneous. This hypothetical creature would represent, it was held, the common ancestor of the two great "strains" or "stocks" one of which in the course of gradual modification gave rise to our living "humanity," and various non-surviving offshoots on the way whilst the other gave rise to the company of great apes, with their tremendous jaws and dog-teeth, their small brains, and great bony skull-crests for the attachment of huge jaw muscles. Until the discovery of the wonderful fossil jaw in the gravel of Piltdown, near Lewes in Sussex, a favourite view as to the probable relationship of man and existing apes was, that if you could trace back the pedigree of man and of the chimpanzee into remote antiquity far back in the Tertiary periodprobably in the early Mioceneyou would arrive at a smallish creature with, proportionately to its size, larger jaws and teeth than any modern man, yet smaller than those of the living man-like apes, and with a brain not two-thirds the size of that of the least developed of modern savages, yet larger (in proportion to its general bulk) than that of the gorilla, chimpanzee, orang, and gibbons.
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