  CHAPTER I NATURE'S INSURGENT SON 1 The Outlook. CHAPTER II THE ADVANCE OF SCIENCE, 1881 - 1906 CHAPTER III. NATURE'S REVENGES: THE SLEEPING SICKNESS. Title: The Kingdom of Man Author: Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 E-text prepared by Turgut Dincer, John Campbell, |
| Note: | Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/kingdomofman00lankrich |
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.
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(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
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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.
