The members of the class mammalia differ much among themselves; and now that we recognize clearly that man is a mammalian vertebrate, the next question is whether an order exists to which our type must be assigned, or whether we have at last reached a point where it is justifiable to establish an isolated division to contain the human species alone.  We are familiar with many representatives of different mammalian orders and with the kind of structural characteristics that serve as convenient distinctions in denoting their relationships.  Horses and cattle, sheep, and goats and pigs resemble one another in many respects besides their hoofs, and they form one natural order; the well-developed gnawing teeth of rats and rabbits and squirrels place these forms together in the order rodentia; the structures adapting their possessors for a flesh-eating and predatory life unite the tribes of the lion, wolf, bear, and seal, in the order carnivora.  Among these and other orders of mammalia is one to which the lemurs, monkeys, and apes are assigned, because all these forms agree in certain structural respects that place them apart from the other mammalia, in the same way, for example, that the races of white men may be recognized as a group distinct from the black and red races.  But comparative studies, prosecuted not only by those who have been forced to adopt the evolutionary interpretation, but also by believers in special creation like Linnaeus and Cuvier and other more modern opponents of evolution, have shown that the peculiar qualities of this order are shared by the human species.  Indeed, the name of primates was given to this section by Linnaeus himself, because the human body found a place in the array which begins at the lower extreme with the lemurs and the monkeys and ends with man at the other end.  Again it is found that no separate order of mammals exists to include only the genus Homo.

To one unacquainted with the facts of vertebrate comparative anatomy, the distinguishing characteristics of the primates seem to be trivial in nature.  It is surprising to find how insignificant are the details to which appeal must be made in order to draw a line between our own division of mammalia and the others.  It is well to review them as they are given in the standard text-books of comparative anatomy.  Primates are eutheria, or true mammalia possessing a placental attachment of the young within the parent.  The first digits, namely, the “great toe” and the “thumb,” are freely movable and opposable to the others, so that the limbs are prehensile and clasping structures; usually but not always the animals of this order are tree-dwellers in correlation with the grasping powers of the feet and hands.  The permanent teeth succeed a shorter series of so-called “milk teeth,” and they are diverse in structure, being incisors, canines, or “eye teeth,” premolars, and molars; the particular numbers of each kind are almost invariable throughout the order and