the beginning of this century, grouped together us vertebrates the four higher of the six classes of animals, he immediately assigned to man a position at their head. Linnæus himself had already, in 1735, in his fundamental "Systema Naturæ," placed man at the head of the mammals, grouping him with the apes and the lemurs in the "Anthropomorpha," or man-like creatures; later he called these dominant animals, or "Primates," the "lords of creation."
Man possesses in his bodily structure all the marks by which mammals are separated from other vertebrates, and there has, therefore, never been any controversy about his belonging to this class. On the contrary, there are, even to this day, differences of opinion as to the place to which man should be assigned in one of the orders of mammals. Cuvier, when he made a new scientific classification of animals (1817), followed the precedent of Blumenbach and created for man the special order Bimana, or two-handed animals, in opposition to the apes and lemurs, who were known as the Quadrumana, or four-handed animals. This arrangement was retained for half a century in most text-books. It first became untenable when Huxley showed, in 1863, that it was based upon an anatomical error, and that the apes were in truth as much two handed as man. Thereupon the order of Primates in the Linnæan sense was again restored.
Most authors in the last thirty years have separated the Primates into three suborders: (1) the lemurs (Prosimiæ); (2) the apes (Simiæ), and (3) men (Anthropi). Again, other zoologists assign to man only the rank of another family in the order of apes. The polymorphic group of true apes (Simiæ or Pitheca) falls into two natural divisions that are geographically quite distinct and have developed entirely independent of each other in the western and the eastern hemispheres. The American or western apes (Hesperopitheca) are distinguished by a short, bony, auditory passage and a broad nasal septum. They are therefore called the flat-nosed apes (Platyrrhinæ). On the contrary, the apes that inhabit Asia and Africa (in early times Europe also) have, like man, a long auditory passage and a narrow nasal septum. They are therefore called Old-World apes (Eopitheca), or also narrow-nosed apes (Catarrhinæ). As man has in the rest of his bodily structure the morphological characters of the Old-World apes and is, like them, thus distinguished from the apes of the New World, certain zoologists have assigned to him a situation within the former group. Undoubtedly this suborder of the catarrhines is an entirely natural division, whose numerous living and extinct species are clearly united by many important characters of bodily structure, but it embraces, nevertheless, a long series of very different structural stages. The lowest dog-apes (Cynopitheca), especially the baboons (Papiomorpha), appear like a repulsive caricature of the noble human form. They remain at a very low stage of development and are allied to the older platyrrhines and prosimians. On the other hand, the tailless apes (Anthropomorpha)
