The whole of the scientific world, and indeed,-of tha lay
world, has been extremely excited by the discovery in South Africa, by lhofessor Raymond Dart, a young Australian scientist attached to the Medical School at Johannesburg, of the fossil skull of an "Ape-Man." By far the best article on the discovery appeared in th... Sunday Times by Professor Sir Arthur Keith. While fully concurring in the interest and importance of the discovery, he sets definite limits to the deductions that can be drawn from it. The skull is that of a Man-like Ape, and not that of an Ape-like Man. As the Sunday Times puts it, "The discovery carries our knowledge of Simian evolution a step forward, but not necessarily our know- ledge of human evolution a step further back. It marks the ascent of the ape, but not the descent of man." The human brain varies in size between 950 cubic centimetres and 1,900 cubic centimetres ; that of the gorilla between 370 c.c. and 620 c.c. Professor Dart's Austrolopithecus, as he calls his new discovery, does not seem according to his measurements to have had a larger brain than that of a gorilla of the same age. Thus it is not so intermediate: a " missing link " as Pithecanthropus, the fossil man of Java, whose brain volume was 850 e.e.
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