the chain of our primate ancestors, by many regarded as of the highest importance.
To this momentous interpretation, which is now accepted by nearly all naturalists, the renowned pathologist of Berlin, Robert Virchow, set up the most obstinate opposition. He went to Leyden for the special purpose of contradicting the idea that the Pithecanthropus is a transitional form, but met with little success. His contention that the skull and the femur of Pithecanthropus could not have belonged together, that the first belonged to an ape and the second to a man, was rejected at once by the expert paleontologists present, who declared unanimously that, in view of the extremely careful and conscientious account of the discovery "there could not the slightest doubt exist that the remains belonged to one and the same individual." Virchow further asserted that a pathological exostosis in the femur of Pithecanthropus likewise testified to its human character, for only by the most careful attention by human hands can such disorders be cured. Immediately thereupon the famous paleontologist Marsh showed a number of similar exostoses upon the leg bones of wild apes, who had had no "nursing care," and yet had recovered. Every great osteological collection contains similar specimens; experienced hunters know that fractures and inflammations of bones in foxes, hares, harts, roebucks, etc., are often healed quite well, without the intervention of man, while those animals are in a state of freedom. Finally, Virchow asserted that the deep notch between the orbital edge and the low skullcap of Pithecanthropus—a sign of a very deep conformation of the temporal fossa—were decisive for the ape-like character of the skull, and that such a formation never occurs in man. A few weeks later the paleontologist Nehring (who from the beginning had supported the just conclusion of Dubois) showed that exactly the same formation was presented by a human skull from Santos, in Brazil.
Virchow had formerly the same want of success with his "patho- logical significance of the skulls of the lower races of man." The famous skulls of Neanderthal, of Spy, of Moulin-Quignon, of La Naulette, etc.—which taken together are the interesting isolated remains of an extinct lower race of man standing between Pithecanthropus and the races of the present day—these were all declared by Virchow to be pathological products; indeed, the sagacious pathologist at last made the incredible assertion that "all organic variations are pathological;" that they are only produced through disease. According to this all our noblest cultivated products, our hunting hounds and our horses, our noble grains and our fine table fruit, are, alas! diseased natural objects that have arisen by pathological changes from the wild original forms that alone are "healthy."
In order to make this strange assertion of Virchow intelligible, it must be remembered that for more than thirty years he has regarded it as his especial duty as a scientist to oppose the Darwinian theory and
