From his tabulated results, it appears that the lumbar power of females differs less from that of males (luring childhood than subsequently. During childhood, the lumbar power of boys is about one-third more than that of girls; towards the age of puberty,. one-half; while in adult life it is more than twice as great. The average strength of a well-developed man is 89 kilograms, or nearly 19 kilegrams more than his-wei,ght in his dress, so that such a man might hold on for a short time by a rope with a weight of 19 kilograms attached to his body. From experiments on the power of the hands, it appears that the manual power of the male sex is greater than that of the female at all ages. Before puberty, the ratio is 3 to 2, and it afterwards becomes 9 to 5. It also appears that the hands acting together produce a greater effect than the sum of the effects they produce when acting singly; and that the right hand is about one-sixth. stronp,:er than the left.
Principal Forbes made a series of experiments on English. Scotch. and Irish students. which, in most respects, are strongly confirmatory of Quetelet's results, but which evince the superior development•of the natives of this country, especially in strength. The. following numbers are selected from Forbes's tables: If we proceed to compare the human figure with that of the animals which in their form approximate most closelyto man (viz., the anthropoid apes), the chief point that strikes us is the great relative size of the human brain-case and brain, and the compara tively small size and vertical direction of the face; the great length and muscularity of the lower extremities, and their adaptation to the erect position; the adaptation of tho hand to the great variety of actions of which it is capable, due mainly to the fact, that the thumb can be opposed to the extremities of all the fingers, whether singly or in combination; the greater breadth of the pelvis, etc.
Those, however, who are inclined to support Mr. Darwin's hypothesis, maintain, that whatever system of organs be studied, the comparison of their modifications in the ape series leads to one and the same result—that the structural differences which sepa rate man from the gorilla and the chimpanzee are not so great as those which separate the gorilla front the lower apes. This by no means implies that the structural dif ferences between man and the highest apes are small and insignificant; it is admitted, on the contrary, " that they are great and significant; that every bone of the gorilla bears rnarks by which it might be distinguished from the correspondinr. bone of a man; and that, in the present creation, at any rate, no intermediate link bridges over the gap between how) and troglodyks.—Husley.
The last point we shall notice is: When did man first appear upon the surface of the globe? All that can be definitely stated upon this subject is, that the geological researches of Boucher de Perthes, Falconer, Prestwich, sir Charles Lyell, and many othens, show that v;thile it is impossible to fix the date of man's appearance, or even to approximate to it, there is apparent evidence of his existence far beyond that which is assigned by our popular chronology. The flint implements which have been dis
covered in the lower gravels of Abbeville and elsewhere, have been already noticed in a special article, and their occurrence in association with the fossil bones of extinct mammals, and the other evidence of their antiquity deduced front their geological position, have been there described.
The Brixham caverns afford similar and corroborative evidence of the antiquity of man. They were discovered accidentally in 1858 by the roof of one of them falling in. Below a thick stalagmite crust, which formed their floor, and which contained some of the bones of the cave-bear, was a mass of loam of an ocherous red color, in some parts 15 ft. in thickness, in which were found remains of the mammoth, an extinct rhinoce ros, the cave-bear, etc., and from various parts of these deposits flint-knives were obtained. Under the bone-deposit was a bed of gravel, which in some parts was more than 20 ft. thick. It contained no fossils, but even in its lowest parts were found speci mens of flint knives. The fabricators of these knives must have lived long antecedently to the tiine when the work of their hands was covered with stalagmite; aud contempo raneous with the stalagmit,e must have been the cave-bear, whose bones were imbedded in it. The ossiferous caves of South Wales (Gower), Sicily, etc., yield similar results. (See KENT'S CAvEnN.) There is reason to believe that in the island of Sardinia the land has risen 100 ft. since man inhabited its shores, possessing at that time the art of fishing by nets and of mak ing a coarse pottery. The western extremity of the island of Crete has been raised about 2,3 ft. since the construction of its ancient ports, which are now high and dry above the sea. Supposing. the movement to have been uniform and equal in the two islands, the mussel beds of Cagliari (in Sardinia) must have emerged from the sea more than 20,0 0 years a:go; but before that time, man fished the waters over them, if count de la. 31armora is right in conjecturing that a flat ball of baked earthen-ware, .with a hole through its axis (which WSS found imbedded among them), was used for weighting a fishing net.
Our last illustration shall be taken from the New World. Agassiz estimates that the southern half of the peninsula of Florida, which is built up of coral reefs, took 133,000 years to form; and hence he would estimate the age of the human jaws and teeth and bones of the feet found in one of the coral banks to be 10,000 years old.
For further information on this interesting and difficult subject, we must refer the reader to sir Charles Lye11's work On the Antiquity of Man. It is right to add that many still dispute the conclusions drawn from these facts; see The Human Spe,eies, by Quatrefages (1879).
MAN (ante). See BIOLOGY; SPECECS.