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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
The change noted in the [ERRATUM] (pg xiii) has been applied to the etext.
Footnote anchors are denoted by [number], and the footnotes have been placed at the end of the book.
Basic fractions are displayed as ½ ⅓ ¼ etc; other fractions are shown in the form a/b, for example 1/5000.
Some minor changes to the text are noted at the [end of the book.]
(upper) Cranial Dome of Pithecanthropus erectus from river gravel in Java.
(lower) Skull of a Greek from an ancient Cemetery.
THE
KINGDOM OF MAN
BY
E. RAY LANKESTER
M.A. D.Sc. LL.D. F.R.S.
HONORARY FELLOW OF EXETER COLLEGE, OXFORD; CORRESPONDENT
OF THE INSTITUTE OF FRANCE; EMERITUS PROFESSOR
OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON; PRESIDENT
OF THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR THE
ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE
DIRECTOR OF THE NATURAL HISTORY DEPARTMENTS OF THE
BRITISH MUSEUM
LONDON
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO LTD
10 ORANGE STREET, LEICESTER SQUARE
1907
EXTINCT ANIMALS
BY
Prof. E. RAY LANKESTER, F.R.S.
With a Portrait of the Author, and 218 other Illustrations
Demy 8vo. Price 7s. 6d. net
DESCRIPTIVE NOTE.
The author gives us here a peep at the wonderful history of the kinds of animals which no longer exist on the surface of the globe in a living state, though once they flourished and held their own. Young and old readers will alike enjoy Prof. Lankester’s interesting narrative of these strange creatures, some of which became extinct millions of years ago, others within our own memory. The author’s account of the finding of their extant remains, their probable habits and functions of life, and their places in the world’s long history, is illustrated profusely from point to point, adding greatly to the entertainment of the story.
Nature: “ ... We give the book a hearty welcome, feeling sure that its perusal will draw many young recruits to the army of naturalists, and many readers to its pages.”
The Times: “There has been published no book on this subject combining so successfully the virtues of accuracy and attractiveness.... Dr. Lankester’s methods as an expositor are well known, but they have never been more pleasantly exemplified than in the present book.”
The Athenæum: “Examples of Extinct Animals and their living representatives Professor Lankester has described with a masterly hand in these present pages.”
LONDON
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO LTD
10 ORANGE STREET, LEICESTER SQUARE
EYRE & SPOTTISWOODE, H.M. PRINTERS, LONDON
DESCRIPTION OF THE FRONTISPIECE
The upper figure is from a cast of the celebrated specimen found in a river gravel in Java, probably of as great age as the palæolithic gravels of Europe. Though rightly to be regarded as a ‘man’—the creature which possessed this skull has been given the name ‘Pithecanthropus.’ The shape of the cranial dome differs from that of a well-developed European human skull (shewn in the lower photograph, that of a Greek skull) in the same features as do the very ancient prehistoric skulls from the Belgian caves of Spey, and from the Neanderthal of the Rhineland. These differences are, however, measurably greater in the Javanese skull.
The three great features of difference are: (1) the great size of the eye-brow ridges (the part below and in front of A in the figures) in the Java skull; (2) the much greater relative height of the middle and back part of the cranial dome (lines e and f) in the Greek skull; (3) the much greater prominence in the Greek skull of the front part of the cranial dome—the prefrontal area or frontal ‘boss’ (the part in front of the line A C, the depth of which is shewn by the line d).
The parts of the cranial cavity thus obviously more capacious in the Greek skull are precisely those which are small in the Apes and overlie those convolutions of the brain which have been specially developed in Man as compared with the highest Apes.
The line A B in both the figures is the ophryo-tentorial line. It is drawn from the ophryon (the mid-point in the line drawn across the narrowest part of the frontal bone just above the eye-brow ridges), which corresponds externally to the most anterior limit of the brain, to the extra-tentorial point (between the occipital ridges) and is practically the base line of the cerebrum. The lines e and f are perpendiculars on this base line, the first half-way between A and B, the second half-way between the first and the extra-tentorial point.
C is the point known to craniologists as ‘bregma,’ the meeting point of the frontal and the two parietal bones.
The line A C is drawn as a straight line joining A and C—but if the skull is accurately posed it corresponds to the edge of the plane at right angles to the sagittal plane of the skull—which traverses both bregma (C) and ophryon (A)—and where it ‘cuts’ the skull marks off the prefrontal area or boss. (See for the full-face view of this area in the two skulls—[Figs. 1 and 2].) The line d is a perpendicular let fall from the point of greatest prominence of the prefrontal area on to the prefrontal plane. It indicates the depth of the prefrontal cerebral region. Drawn on both sides on the surface of the bone and looked at from in front (the white dotted line in Figs. 1 and 2) it gives the maximum breadth of the prefrontal area.
By dividing the ophryo-tentorial line into 100 units, and using those units as measures, the depths of the brain cavity in the regions plumbed by the lines d, e, and f, can be expressed numerically and their differences in a series of skulls stated in percentage of the ophryo-tentorial length.
CONTENTS
| PAGE | ||
| CHAPTER I. — | Nature’s Insurgent Son | [1] |
| CHAPTER II. — | The Advance of Science, 1881–1906 | [66] |
| CHAPTER III. — | Nature’s Revenges: The Sleeping Sickness | [159] |
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
| Frontispiece: | — Profile views of the Cranial Dome of Pithecanthropus erectus, the ape-like man from an ancient river gravel in Java, and of a Greek skull. |
| Fig. 1. | — Frontal view of the Cranial Dome of Pithecanthropus | [16] |
| Fig. 2. | — Frontal view of the same Greek skull as that shown in the frontispiece | [16] |
| Fig. 3. | — Eoliths, of ‘borer’ shape, from Ightham, Kent | [18] |
| Fig. 4. | — Eoliths of trinacrial shape, from Ightham, Kent | [20] |
| Fig. 5. | — Brain casts of four large Mammals | [23] |
| Fig. 6. | — Spironema pallidum, the microbe of Syphilis discovered by Fritz Schaudinn | [37] |
| Fig. 7. | — The Canals in Mars | [43] |
| Fig. 8. | — The Canals in Mars | [44] |
| Fig. 9. | — Becquerel’s shadow-print obtained by rays from Uranium Salt | [73] |
| Fig. 10. | — Diagrams of the visible lines of the Spectrum given by incandescent Helium and Radium | [76] |
| Fig. 11. | — The transformation of Radium Emanation into Helium (spectra) | [83] |
| Fig. 12. | — Dry-plate photograph of a Nebula and surrounding stars | [90] |
| Fig. 13. | — The Freshwater Jelly fish, Limnocodium | [97] |
| Fig. 14. | — Polyp of Limnocodium | [97] |
| Fig. 15. | — Sense-organ of Limnocodium | [97] |
| Fig. 16. | — The Freshwater Jelly-fish of Lake Tanganyika | [98] |
| Fig. 17. | — Sir Harry Johnston’s specimen of the Okapi | [99] |
| Fig. 18. | — Bandoliers cut from the striped skin of the Okapi | [99] |
| Fig. 19. | — Skull of the horned male of the Okapi | [100] |
| Fig. 20. | — The metamorphosis of the young of the common Eel | [101] |
| Fig. 21. | — A unicellular parasite of the common Octopus, producing spermatozoa | [102] |
| Fig. 22. | — The Coccidium, a microscopic parasite of the Rabbit, producing spermatozoa | [102] |
| Fig. 23. | — Spermatozoa of a unicellular parasite inhabiting a Centipede | [103] |
| Fig. 24. | — The motile fertilizing elements (antherozoids or spermatozoa) of a peculiar cone-bearing tree, the Cycas revoluta | [104] |
| Fig. 25. | — The gigantic extinct Reptile, Triceratops | [106] |
| Fig. 26. | — A large carnivorous Reptile from the Triassic rocks of North Russia | [107] |
| Fig. 27. | — The curious fish Drepanaspis, from the Old Red Sandstone of Germany | [107] |
| Fig. 28. | — The oldest Fossil Fish known | [108] |
| Fig. 29. | — The skull and lower jaw of the ancestral Elephant, Palæomastodon, from Egypt | [109] |
| Fig. 30. | — The latest discovered skull of Palæomastodon | [110] |
| Fig. 31. | — Skulls of Meritherium, an Elephant ancestor, from the Upper Eocene of Egypt | [111] |
| Fig. 32. | — The nodules on the roots of bean-plants and the nitrogen-fixing microbe, Bacillus radicola, which produces them | [114] |
| Fig. 33. | — The continuity of the protoplasm of vegetable cells | [116] |
| Fig. 34. | — Diagram of the structures present in a typical organic ‘cell’ | [117] |
| Fig. 35. | — The Number of the Chromosomes | [119] |
| Fig. 36. | — The Number of the Chromosomes | [120] |
| Figs. 37 to 42. — Phagocytes engulphing disease germs— drawn by Metschnikoff | [136-7] | |
| Fig. 43. | — A Phagocyte containing three Spirilla, the germs of relapsing fever, which it has engulphed | [137] |
| Fig. 44. | — The life-history of the Malaria Parasite | [142] |
| Fig. 45. | — The first blood-cell parasite described, the Lankesterella of Frog’s blood | [144] |
| Fig. 46. | — Various kinds of Trypanosomes | [145] |
| Fig. 47. | — The Laboratory of the Marine Biological Association on the Citadel Hill, Plymouth | [155] |
| Fig. 48. | — The Tsetze fly, Glossina morsitans | [172] |
| Fig. 49. | — The Trypanosome of Frog’s blood | [173] |
| Fig. 50. | — The Trypanosome which causes the Sleeping Sickness | [176] |
| Fig. 51. | — The Trypanosome of the disease called “Dourine” | [177] |
| Figs. 52 to 56. — Stages in the growth and multiplication of a Trypanosome which lives for part of its life in the blood of the little owl, Athene noctua, and for the other part in the gut of the common Gnat (Culex) | [180-3] | |
PREFACE
This little volume is founded on three discourses which I have slightly modified for the present purpose, and have endeavoured to render interesting by the introduction of illustrative process blocks, which are described sufficiently fully to form a large extension of the original text.
The first, entitled ‘Nature’s Insurgent Son,’ formed, under another title, the Romanes lecture at Oxford in 1905. Its object is to exhibit in brief the ‘Kingdom of Man,’ to shew that there is undue neglect in the taking over of that possession by mankind, and to urge upon our Universities the duty of acting the leading part in removing that neglect.
The second is an account, which served as the presidential address to the British Association at York in 1906, of the progress made in the last quarter of a century towards the assumption of his kingship by slowly-moving Man.
The third, reprinted from the Quarterly Review, is a more detailed account of recent attempts to deal with a terrible disease—the Sleeping Sickness of tropical Africa—and furnishes an example of one of the innumerable directions in which Man brings down disaster on his head by resisting the old rule of selection of the fit and destruction of the unfit, and is painfully forced to the conclusion that knowledge of Nature must be sought and control of her processes eventually obtained. I am glad to be able to state that as a result of the representations of the Tropical Diseases Committee of the Royal Society, and, as I am told, in some measure in consequence of the explanation of the state of things given in this essay, funds have been provided by the Colonial Office for the support of a professorship of Protozoology in the University of London, to which Mr. E. A. Minchin has been appointed. It is recognized that the only way in which we can hope to deal effectually with such diseases as the Sleeping Sickness is by a greatly increased knowledge of the nature and life-history of the parasitic Protozoa which produce those diseases.
I have to thank Mr. John Murray for permission to reprint the article on Sleeping Sickness, and I am also greatly indebted to scientific colleagues for assistance in the survey of progress given in the second discourse. Amongst these I desire especially to mention Mr. Frederick Soddy, F.R.S., Prof. H. H. Turner, F.R.S., Prof. Sydney Vines, F.R.S., Mr. MacDougal of Oxford, and Prof. Sherrington, F.R.S. To Mr. Perceval Lowell I owe my thanks for permission to copy two of his drawings of Mars, and to the Royal Astronomical Society for the loan of the star-picture on [p. 90].
E. Ray Lankester,
January, 1907.
ERRATUM.
Page 98: first line of description beneath [Fig. 16.], for Limnocodium read Limnocnida.
THE KINGDOM OF MAN