[13] Having applied to Professor Flower, as the highest authority, to inform me of the actual position of the evidence as to the Dryopithecus, he was good enough to reply to me as follows—
"Dryopithecus (Middle Miocene of France) is an undoubted anthropoid, allied to gorilla and chimpanzee, but the recent discovery of a more complete jaw than that first found shows that it is rather a lower form than the two just mentioned, instead of higher as once thought. See Gaudry, Mem. Soc. Geol. France—Palæontologie, 1890.
"The animal called Pliopithecus, from the same formation, is now generally considered to be not distinguishable from the genus Hylobates (Gibbon).
"So there is no doubt about the existence of anthropoid apes in the Miocene of Europe, but not of a higher type than the present African or Asiatic species. Yours truly,
"W. Flower."
[14] Professor Wright in Century, April 1891
[15] Quatrefages and Hamy, Crania Ethnica
[16] Topinard, one of the latest and best authorities, says in his book on Anthropology: "We have seen the marked difference between woolly and straight hair, between the prognathous and the orthognathous, the jet black of the Yoloff and the pale complexion of the Scandinavian, between the ultra-dolichocephalic Esquimaux or New Caledonian, and the ultra-brachycephalic Mongolian. But the line of separation between the European and the Bosjesman, as regards these two characters, is, in a morphological point of view, still wider, as much so as between each of the anthropoid apes, or between the dog and the wolf, the goat and the sheep."
[17] If Ameghino's discoveries of an anthropoid type in the Lower Eocene of Patagonia should be confirmed, it would incline the balance of evidence in favour of South America, or rather of the temperate zone of the southern hemisphere, as the most probable scene of the evolution of the quadrumana, including the human variety, from ancestral forms allied to the marsupials of the Secondary period