MAN'S RELATION TO APES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 15141, 4 November 1912, Page 5

MAN'S RELATION TO APES.

I As" interesting lecture was given by Mr. P. Hereford in the Palace Theatre last night, upon "Man's Relationship to tho Monkeys," illustrated by appropriate lantern slides. The lecturer traced the appearance of life upon the earth from the primitive to the earliest fossils of apes found in .the amoeba tertiary rocks. This series, which begins, he said, with invertebrate creatures, is obtained by the combined results of the studies of fossil bones, and of the classification of animals. About tho beginning of the tertiary age, which was anything between 3,000,000 and 10,000,000 years long, the whole earth was covered by the race of marsupials, some of whom were carnivorous. One branch of the marsupials, the opossums, commenced to live in trees, and these were the ancestors of the semi-apes, who were in turn the ancestors of the true apes. There were two kinds of monkeys, said the lecturer, the narrow-nosed with 32 teeth, and the flatnosed with 36, who lived in America. The , narrow-nosed apes and man were, he claimed, closely related, the American monkeys being of a distinctly lower type. The American Indian was only a species of Chinaman, who crossed from Asia, via Behring Straits. From tho narrow-nosed monkeys, tho anthropoid apes, "man's cousins," were developed. By comparing the skeletons of man, the gorilla, the orangoutang, and the chimpanzee, and their individual organs, such as the ear and the foot, the lecturer sought to show that man and these animals had a common ancestor. In conclusion, the lecturer stated thcro were but three- points of difference between men and apes, the power of speech, the power of walking upright, and the question of the soul. The first two of these, in the case of man, were onlv accidents of f development. * [