New York, Nov. 4.
The expedition sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, which will set forth for China next February, will search not only for fossils of the ape-man, regarded by biologists as the "missing link" in the chain of evolution, but will study the aboriginal tribes now said to be fast disappearing in China.
"We know as little about some of the living natives as about the fossil history of the country," says Mr. Roy Chapman Andrews, who will lead the expedition. "Long before the Chinese arrived, China was inhabited by aboriginal tribes, which were pushed south and west, just as the Indians were driven westward by white men who advanced across the American Continent.
"Remnants of nearly 30 of these tribes, such as Lolos, Moses, Lisos and others are rapidly disappearing, and the expedition expects to study them before they become extinct."
Describing these aborigines, with whom he has hunted, Mr. Andrews said they are totally unlike Chinese, having tall and slender bodies, long Taces, patrician noses, and other characteristics of Caucasian blood.
Tue Craps or Mankinn Mr. Andrews says that scientific men are now agreed in the belief that the oldest prehistoric remains of man, and of many beasts, lie somewhere within the Great Central Asiatic Plateau, where few white men have ever penetrated.
One of the reasons why little is known of China's fossils and those of interior Asia is that material of this sort is carefully concealed by the Chinese, who term the relics "'dragon's bones," and use them for medicinal purposes, said Mr. Andrews.
One result expected is the education of Americans in a knowledge of the immense continent across the Pacific. Whether success or failure meets the attempt to find the "missing link," hundreds of thousands of specimens of Asiatic animal and plant life are to be collected and brought to America. These it is planned are to be placed in the proposed $1,000,000 Hall of Asiatic Lifo in this city.
Headquarters for the expedition are to be at Peking. The work of the expedition is to continue for five years. The first year will be devoted to studies in paleontology and zoology in China. The second year the work is to be carried into Mongolia, with geologists added to the field staff. Then for the next three years the entire force will be scattered in widespread sections of Asia.—Reuter.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.