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THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP

THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP

THE ETHICAL KINSHIP

THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP

'Like the Roman emperors, who, intoxicated by their power, at length regarded themselves as demigods, so the ruler of the earth believes that the animals subjected to his will have nothing in common with his own nature. Man is not content to be the king of animals. He insists on having it that an impassable gulf separates him from his subjects. The affinity of the ape disturbs and humbles him. And, turning his back upon the earth, he flies, with his threatened majesty, into the cloudy sphere of a special "human kingdom." But Anatomy, like those slaves who followed the conqueror's car crying, "Thou art a man," disturbs him in his self-admiration, and reminds him of those plain and tangible realities which unite him with the animal world.'

-- Broca.

THE UNIVERSAL KINSHIP

The PHYSICAL KINSHIP

Man's body is composed fundamentally of the same materials as the bodies of all other animals. The bodies of all animals are composed of clay. They are formed of the same elements as those that murmur in the waters, gallop in the winds, and constitute the substance of the insensate rocks and soils. More than two-thirds of the weight of the human body is made up of oxygen alone, a gas which forms one-fifth of the weight of the air, more than eight-ninths of that of the sea, and forty-seven per cent, of the superficial solids of the earth.

Man's body is composed of cells. So are the bodies of all other animals. And the cells in the body of a human being are not essentially different in composition or structure from the cells in the body of the sponge. All cells are composed primarily of protoplasm, a compound of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen. Like all other animals, man is incapable of producing a particle of the essential substance of which his body is made. No animal can produce protoplasm. This is a power of the plant, and the plant only. All that any animal can do is to burn the compounds formed in the sun-lit laboratories of the vegetable world. The human skeleton, like the skeletons of nearly all other animals, is composed chiefly of lime--lime being, in the sea, where life spent so many of its earlier centuries, the most available material for parts whose purpose it is to furnish shape and durability to the organism. Man grows from an egg. So do all creatures of clay. Every animal commences at the same place--in a single, lowly, almost homogeneous cell. A dog, a frog, a philosopher, and a worm cannot for a long time after their embryonic commencement be distinguished from each other. Like the oyster, the ox, the insect, and the fish, like all that live, move, and breathe, man is mortal. He increases in size and complexity through an allotted period of time; then, like all his kindred, wilts back into the indistinguishable flux from which he came. Man inhales oxygen and exhales carbon dioxide. So does every animal that breathes, whether it breathe by lungs, gills, skin, or ectosarc, and whether it breathe the sunless ooze of the sea floor or the ethereal blue of the sky. Animals inhale oxygen because they eat carbon and hydrogen. The energy of all animals is produced mainly by the union of oxygen with the elements of carbon and hydrogen in the tissues of animal bodies, the plentiful and ardent oxygen being the most available supporter of the combustion of these two elements.

Man is, then, an animal, more highly evolved than the most of his fellow-beings, but positively of the same clay, and of the same fundamental make-up, with the same eagerness to exceed and the same destiny, as his less pompous kindred who float and frolic and pass away in the seas and atmospheres, and creep over the land-patches of a common clod.

Man is, then, like the fishes, frogs, reptiles, birds, and quadrupeds, a vertebrate animal. Excepting in his infancy, when he is a quadruped going on all fours, he uses his posterior limbs only for locomotion, and his anterior for prehension and the like. His spinal axis is erect instead of horizontal, and his tail is atrophied. But he possesses all of the unmistakable qualities of the vertebrate type of structure--a two-chambered body cavity, a highly developed and dorsally located nerve trunk, vertebrate vitals, a closed circulatory system, a ventral heart, red blood, a head containing sense organs and brain, and a well-ordered internal skeleton, consisting of a vertebral column with skull and ribs and two pairs of limbs, the limbs consisting each of one long bone, two long bones, two transverse rows of irregular bones, and five branches at the end.

The nearest relatives by blood man has in this world are the exceedingly man-like apes--the tailless anthropoids--the gorillas and chimpanzees of Africa, and the orangs and gibbons of southern and insular Asia. The fact that man is an actual relative and descendant of the ape is one of the most disagreeable of the many distasteful truths which the human mind in its evolution has come upon. To a vanity puffed, as is that of human beings, to the splitting, the consanguinity of gorilla and gentleman seems horrible. Man prefers to have arrived on the earth by way of a ladder let down by his imagination from the celestial concave. Within his own memory man has been guilty of many foolish and disgraceful things. But this attempt by him to repudiate his ancestors by surreptitiously fabricating for himself an origin different from, and more glorious than the rest is one of the most absurd and scandalous in the whole list. It is a shallow logic--the logic of those who, without worth of their own, try to shine with a false and stolen lustre. No more masterly rebuke was ever administered to those in the habit of sneering at the truth in this matter than the caustic reply of Huxley to the taunt of the fat-witted Bishop--that he would rather be the descendant of a respectable ape than the descendant of one who not only closed his eyes to the facts around him, but used his official position to persuade others to do likewise. Man's reluctance to take his anatomical place beside his simian kinspeople has been exceeded only by his selfish and high-handed determination to exclude all other terrestrial beings from his heaven.

Man is a talkative and religious ape. He is an ape, but with a much greater amount of enterprise and with a greater likelihood of being found in every variety of climate. Like the anthropoid, man has a bald face and an obsolete tail. But he is distinguished from his arboreal relative by his arrogant bearing, his skilled larynx, and especially by the satisfaction he experiences in the contemplation of the image which appears when he looks in a mirror.

The man-like apes are from three to six feet tall, and are all of them very strong, the gorilla, who sometimes weighs over three hundred pounds, being about the bravest and most formidable unarmed animal on the planet. They are erect or semi-erect, have loud voices, plantigrade feet, and irritable dispositions--in all of these particulars being strikingly like men. The gorilla, chimpanzee, and gibbon are highlanders, preferring the uplands and mountains. The orang is a lowlander, living phlegmatically among the sylvan swamps of Sumatra and Borneo. The gorilla and chimpanzee are terrestrial, seldom going among the trees except to get food or to sleep. The orang and gibbon are arboreal, seldom coming to the ground except to drink or bathe. They all walk on their hind-limbs, generally in a stooping posture, with their knuckles or fingers touching the ground. But they sometimes walk with their arms hanging down by their sides, and sometimes with their hands clasped back of their heads to give them balance. None of them ever place their palms on the ground when they walk--that is, none of them walk on four feet. The anthropoid races, in the shape of their heads and faces and in the general form and structure of their bodies, and even in their habits of life, resemble in a remarkable manner the lowest races of human beings. This resemblance is recognised by the negro races, who call the gorilla and chimpanzee 'hairy men,' and believe them to be descendants of outcast members of their own species.

There are differences in structure between man and the apes, just as there are differences in structure between the Caucasian and the Caffre, or even between individual Caucasians or individual Caffres. There are differences in structure and topography, often very noticeable differences, even among members of the same family. But in all of its essential characters, and extending often to astonishing particulars, the structure of man is identical with that of the anthropoid.

In external appearances the man-like races differ from men in having a luxuriant covering of natural hair. But anthropoids differ very much among themselves in this particular. The orang, usually covered with long hair, is sometimes almost hairless. There are, too, races of human beings whose bodies are covered with a considerable growth of hair. The Todas and Ainus are noted for the hairiness of their bodies, certain individuals among them being covered with a real fur, especially on the lower limbs.

Individuals also often appear in every race with a remarkable development of the hair. Adrian and his son Fedor, exhibited years ago over Europe as 'dog-men,' are examples. The father was completely covered with a thick growth of fine dirty-yellow hair two or three inches long. Long tufts grew out of his nostrils and ears, giving him a striking resemblance to a Skye terrier. Fedor, and also his sister, were covered with hair like the father, but another son was like ordinary men. The man-like races have also longer arms in proportion to the height of the body than man generally has. But this is also true of human infants and negroes. The gibbon has relatively much longer arms than the other anthropoids. It differs from the chimpanzee in this respect more than the chimpanzee differs from man. When standing upright and reaching down with the middle finger, the gibbon can touch its foot, while the chimpanzee can reach only to the knee. Man ordinarily reaches part way down the thigh, but negroes have been known to have arms reaching to the knee-pan.

The skeleton of the African races contains many characters recognised by osteologists as 'pithecoid,' or ape-like. It is massive, the flat bones are thick, and the pelvis narrow. In the manlike apes the large toe is opposable to the other four, and is used by them much as the thumb is used. But this difference between the two races of beings is just what might be expected from the differences in their modes of life. Man has little need of this opposability on account of his exclusively terrestrial life, while to the ape it is indispensable on account of his arboreal environment and life. 'But there are,' says Haeckel, 'wild tribes of men who can oppose the large toe to the other four just as if it were a thumb, and even new-born infants of the most highly-developed races of men can grasp as easily with their hind-hands as with their forehands. Chinese boatmen row with their feet, and Bengal workmen weave with them. The negro, in whom the big toe is freely movable, seizes hold of the branches of trees with it when climbing, just like the four-handed apes'.

Many men have lost their arms by accident and have learned to use their feet as hands with wonderful skill. Not many years ago there died in Europe an armless violinist who had during his lifetime played to cultured audiences in most of the capitals of the world. Some of the most accomplished of penmen hold their pen between their toes. The man-like apes live to about the same age as man, and all of them, like man, have beards. The anthropoid beard, too, like the human, appears at the age of sexual maturity. The human beard often differs in colour from the hair of the scalp, and whenever it does it has been observed to be invariably lighter--never darker--than the hair on the scalp. This is true among all races of men. The same rule and the same uniformity exists among anthropoids. The races of mankind are divided into two primary groups depending upon the shape of the head and the character of the hair: the short-headed races , such as the Malays, Mongols, and Aryans, with round or oval faces, straight hair, and vertical profiles; and the long-headed races , with woolly hair and prognathous faces, such as the Papuans and Africa races. The skin of the short-headed races is orange or white, while the skin and hair of the long-headed races are glossy black.

It is, at least, interesting that the orang and gibbon, who live in Asia and its islands, where the brachycephalic races of men supposedly arose, are themselves brachycephalic; and that the gorilla and chimpanzee, who live in Africa, where the dolichocephalic races chiefly live, are dolichocephalic. The gorilla and chimpanzee also have, like the men and women of Africa, black skin and hair; while the hair of the orang is a reddish-brown, and its skin sometimes yellowish-white. The dentition of the anthropoids and men is in all essentials identical. They all have two sets of teeth: a set of milk-teeth, twenty in number, and thirty-two permanent teeth, the permanents consisting of two incisors, one canine, two premolars, and three molars, in each half-jaw. Man has ordinarily twelve pairs of ribs and thirty-two vertebrae. So has the orang. The other anthropoids have thirteen pairs of ribs. But the number of ribs in both human and anthropoid beings is not uniform, man occasionally having thirteen pairs, and the gorilla fourteen. Man has also the same number of caudal vertebrae in his rudimentary tail as the anthropoid has. The hands and feet of anthropoids, bone for bone and muscle for muscle, correspond with those of men, no greater structural differences existing than among different species of men. The human foot has three muscles not found in the human hand--a short flexor muscle, a short extensor muscle, and a long muscle extending from the fibula to the foot. All of these muscles are found in the anthropoid foot just as in the foot of man. There are also the same differences between the arrangement of the bones of the anthropoid wrist and ankle as between the wrist and ankle bones of man. Whatever set of anatomical particulars may be selected, whether it be hands, arms, feet, muscles, skull, viscera, ribs, or dentition, it is found that the anthropoid races and men are in all essentials the same. The differences are such as have arisen as a result of different modes of life, and such as exist between different tribes of either group of animals.

'The structural differences which separate man from the gorilla and chimpanzee,' says Huxley, in summing up the conclusion of his brilliant inquiry into 'Man's Place in Nature,' 'are not so great as those which separate the gorilla from the lower apes.'

'The body of man and that of the anthropoid are not only peculiarly similar,' says Haeckel, 'but they are practically one and the same in every important respect. The same two hundred bones, in the same order and structure, make up our inner skeleton; the same three hundred muscles effect our movements; the same hair clothes our skin; the same four-chambered heart is the central pulsometer in our circulation; the same thirty-two teeth are set in the same order in our jaws; the same salivary, hepatic, and gastric glands compass our digestion; the same reproductive organs insure the maintenance of our race'.

And it is not true, as is commonly supposed, that, after all other resemblances between the human and anthropoid structures have been made out, there still exists somewhere some undistinguishable difference in the organic structure of their brains. All differences in structure from time to time suspected or asserted to exist between the brain of man and that of the man-like apes have been one after another completely swept away. And it is now known to all neurologists that the human and anthropoid brains differ structurally in no particulars whatever, both of them containing the same lobes, the same ventricles and cornua, and the same convolutional outline. Even the posterior lobe, the posterior cornu, and the hippocampus minor, so long triumphantly asserted to be characteristic features of the human brain, have been pitilessly identified in all anthropoids by the profound and terrible Huxley. There is not an important fold or fissure in the brain of man that is not found in the brain of the anthropoid. 'The surface of the brain of a monkey,' says Huxley, 'exhibits a sort of skeleton map of man's, and in the man-like apes the details become more and more filled in, until it is only in minor characters that the chimpanzee's or the orang's brain can be structurally distinguished from man's'.

The anatomical gulf between men and apes does not exist. There are, in fact, no gulfs anywhere, only gradations. All chasms are completely covered by unmistakable affinities, in spite of the fact that the remains of so many millions of deceased races lie hidden beneath seas or everlastingly locked in the limy bosoms of the continents. There are closer kinships and remoter kinships, but there are kinships everywhere. The more intimate kinships are indicated by more definite and detailed similarities, and the more general relationships by more fundamental resemblances. All creatures are bound to all other creatures by the ties of a varying but undeniable consanguinity.

Man stands unquestionably in the primate order of animals, because he has certain qualities of structure which all primates have, and which all other animals have not: hands and arms and nails, a bagpipe stomach, great subordination of the cerebellum, a disc-like placenta, teeth differentiated into incisors, canines, and molars, and pectoral milk glands.

Man is more closely akin to the anthropoid apes than to the other primates on account of his immense brain, his ape-like face, his vertical spine, and in being a true two-handed biped. The manlike apes and men have the same number and kinds of teeth, the same limb bones and muscles, like ribs and vertebrae, an atrophied tail, the same brain structure, and a suspicious similarity in looks and disposition. Men and anthropoids live about the same number of years, both being toothless and wrinkled in old age. The beard, too, in both classes of animals appears at the same period of life and obeys the same law of variation in colour. Even the hairs on different parts of the bodies of men and anthropoids, as on the arms, incline at a like angle to the body surface. The hair on the upper arm and that on the forearm, in both anthropoids and men, point in opposite directions--toward the elbow. This peculiarity is found nowhere in the animal kingdom excepting in a few American monkeys.

The fishes, frogs, reptiles, birds, and non-human mammals are human in having two body cavities, segmented internal skeletons, two pairs of limbs, skulls and spinal columns, red blood, brains, and dorsal cords; and in possessing two eyes, two ears, nostrils, and mouth opening out of the head. And finally all animals, including man, are related to all other animal forms by the great underlying facts of their origin, structure, composition, and destiny. All creatures, whether they live in the sea, in the heavens, or in subterranean glooms; whether they swim, fly, crawl, or walk; whether their world is a planet or a water-drop; and whether they realise it or not, commence existence in the same way, are composed of the same substances, are nourished by the same matters, follow fundamentally the same occupations, all do under the circumstances the best they can, and all arrive ultimately at the same pitiful end.

The similarities and homologies of structure existing between man and other animals, and between other animals and still others, are not accidental and causeless. They are not resemblances scattered arbitrarily among the multitudinous forms of life by the capricious levities of chance. That all animals commence existence as an egg and are all made up of cells composed of the same protoplasmic substance, and all inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, and are all seeking pleasure and seeking to avoid pain, are more than ordinary facts. They are filled with inferences. That vertebrate animals, differing in externals as widely as herring and Englishmen, are all built according to the same fundamental plan, with marrow-filled backbones and exactly two pairs of limbs branching in the same way, is an astonishing coincidence. That the wing of the bird, the foreleg of the dog, the flipper of the whale, and the fore-limb of the toad and crocodile, have essentially the same bones as the human arm has is a fact which may be without significance to blind men, but to no one else. The metamorphosis of the frog from a fish, of the insect from a worm, and of a poet from a senseless cell, are transformations simply marvellous in meaning. And it is not easy, since Darwin, to understand how such lessons could remain long unintelligible, even to stones and simpletons. Not many generations have passed, however, since these revelations, now so distinct and wonderful, fell on the listless minds of men as ineffectually as the glories of the flower fall on the sightless sockets of the blind.

It is hardly two generations since the highest intelligences on the earth conceived that not only the different varieties of men--the black, the white, and the orange--but all the orders and genera of the animal world, and not only animals, but plants, had all been somehow simultaneously and arbitrarily brought into existence in some indistinct antiquity, and that they had from the beginning all existed with practically the same features and in approximately the same conditions as those with which and in which they are found to-day. The universe was conceived to be a fixed and stupid something, born as we see it, incapable of growth, and indulging in nothing but repetitions. There were no necessary coherencies and consanguinities, no cosmical tendencies operating eternally and universally. All was whimsical and arbitrary. It was not known that anything had grown or evolved. All things were believed to have been given beginning and assigned to their respective places in the universe by a potential and all-clever creator. The serpent was limbless because it had officiously allowed Eve to include in her dietary that which had been expressly forbidden. The quadruped walked with its face towards the earth as a structural reminder of its subjection to the biped, who was supposed to be especially skilled in keeping his eyes rolled heavenward. The flowers flung out their colours, not for the benefit of the bugs and bees, and the stars paraded, not because they were moved to do so by their own eternal urgings, but because man had eyes capable of being affected by them. Man was an erect and featherless vertebrate because his hypothetical maker was erect and featherless.

The world now knows--at least, the scientific part of it knows--that these things are not true, that they are but the solemn fancies of honest but simple-minded ancients who did the best they could in that twilight age to explain to their inquiring instincts the wilderness of phenomena in which they found themselves. The universe is a process. It is not petrified, but flowing. It is going somewhere. Everything is changing and evolving, and will always continue to do so. The forms of life, of continents and oceans, and of streams and systems, which we perceive as we open our senses upon the world to-day, are not the forms that have always existed, and they are not the forms of the eternal future. There was a time, away in the inconceivable, when there was no life upon the earth, no solids, and no seas. The world was an incandescent lump, lifeless and alone, in the cold solitudes of the spaces. There was a time--there must have been a time--when life appeared for the first time upon the earth, simple cellules without bones or blood, and without a suspicion of their immense and quarrelsome posterity. There was a time when North America was an island, and the Alleghany Mountains were the only mountains of the continent. The time was--in the coal-forming age--when the Mississippi Valley, from the Colorado Islands to the Alleghanies, was a vast marsh or sea, choked with forests of equisetum and fern, and swarming with gigantic reptiles now extinct. There was a time when palms grew in Dakota, and magnolias waved in the semi-tropical climate of Greenland and Spitzbergen. There was a time when there were no Rocky Mountains in existence, no Andes, no Alps, no Pyrenees, and no Himalayas. And that time, compared with the vast stretches of geological duration, was not so very long ago, for these mountains are all young mountains. The time was when Jurassic saurians--those repulsive ruffians of that rude old time--represented the highest intelligence and civilisation of the known universe. There were no men and women in the world, not even savages, when our ape-like forefathers wandered and wondered through the awesome silences of primeval wilds; there were no railroads, steamboats, telegraphs, telephones, typewriters, harvesters, electric lights, nor sewing machines; no billionaires nor bicycles, no socialists nor steam-heat, no 'watered stock' nor 'government by injunction,' no women's clubs, captains of industry, labour unions, nor 'yellow perils'--there was none of these things on the earth a hundred years ago. All things have evolved to be what they are--the continents, oceans, and atmospheres, and the plants and populations that live in and upon them.

Those of each generation that have died have been inferior, or unfitted to the environment in which they found themselves. Those that have survived have been superior, superior in something--bigness, cunning, courage, virtue, vitality, strength, speed, littleness, or ferocity--something that has related them advantageously to surrounding conditions. The surviving remnant of each generation have become the progenitors of the next generation, and have transmitted, or tended to transmit, to their offspring the qualities of their superiority. This winnowing has gone on in each generation of living beings during many millions of years--almost ever since life commenced to be on the earth. Some have continued themselves, and others have died childless. The environment of each species has been an immense sieve, and only the superior have gone through it. Different environments have emphasised different qualities of structure and disposition, and have thus given rise to permanent varieties in survival. These varieties, through the accumulated effects of many generations of selection, have diverged into species; species, after a still longer series of selections, have evolved into genera; genera have evolved into families; families into orders; and so on. In this simple, terrible manner have all the branches of organic beings been brought into existence.

That the forms of life to-day found on the earth have come into existence by the evolution of the more complex forms from the simpler, and of these simpler forms from still simpler, through the ever-operating law of Selection, is a necessary conclusion from the following facts:

If we knew by actual observation as little concerning the evolution of individuals as we do of the evolution of species--if we had always been used to seeing animals, including ourselves, in full bloom--had never watched the tadpole, the pupa, and the babe pass through their wonderful metamorphoses on their way to maturity, it would probably be just as hard for many minds to believe that animals evolve individually to be what they are as it is for them to believe that species have grown to be what they are. In the case of individuals, however, the evolution takes place right before our eyes largely, while the evolution of species goes on so slowly and stretches back so far into the past that it can only be inferred.

There are no more remarkable instances of individual evolution in the whole range of animal life. The fish, the reptile, the bird, the dog, and the human being--all vertebrates, in short--cannot for some time after their embryonic commencement be distinguished from each other. 'The feet of lizards and mammals, the wings and feet of birds, and the hands and feet of men,' says the illustrious Von Baer, as quoted by Darwin, 'all arise from the same fundamental form'.

'It is quite in the later stages of development,' says Huxley, 'that the human being presents marked differences from the ape, while the latter departs as much from the dog in its development as the man does'.

Not only frogs, but reptiles, birds, and mammals, including man, all have gills at a certain stage in their embryonic development. Nearly all the lower invertebrate animals are hermaphroditic--that is, in the body of each animal is found the two kinds of sex organs which in the higher animals exist in distinct animals. And frogs, birds, and other higher animals, which as adults are unisexual, have, as an inheritance from these primitive forms, hermaphroditic embryos.

The first thing that an animal becomes after it is an egg--unless it is a one-celled animal, in which case it remains always an egg--is two cells; these two cells become four; these four become eight; and so on, until the embryo becomes a many-celled ball, consisting of a single layer of cells surrounding a fluid interior. A dimple forms in the cell layer on one side of this ball, and, by deepening to a hollow, changes the ball into a double-walled sac. This is the gastrula--the permanent structure of the sponges and celenterates, and an invariable stage in the larval development of all animals above the sponges and celenterates. The gastrula becomes a worm by elongation and enlargement, and by the development of the endoderm, which is the inner layer of the cell wall, into organs of nutrition and reproduction, and by the development of the ectoderm, which is the outer cell layer, into organs of motion and sensation.

The embryonic development of a human being is not different in kind from the embryonic development of any other animal. Every human being at the beginning of his organic existence is a protozoan, about 1/125 inch in diameter; at another stage of development he is a tiny sac-shaped mass of cells without blood or nerves, the gastrula; at another stage he is a worm, with a pulsating tube instead of a heart, and without head, neck, spinal column, or limbs; at another stage he has, as a backbone, a rod of cartilage extending along the back, and a faint nerve cord, as in amphioxus, the lowest of the vertebrates; at another stage he is a fish with a two-chambered heart, mesonephric kidneys, and gill-slits with gill arteries leading to them, just as in fishes; at another stage he is a reptile with a three-chambered heart, and voiding his excreta through a cloaca like other reptiles; and finally, when he enters upon post-natal sins and actualities, he is a sprawling, squalling, unreasoning quadruped. The human larva from the fifth to the seventh month of development is covered with a thick growth of hair and has a true caudal appendage, like the monkey. At this stage the embryo has in all thirty-eight vertebrae, nine of which are caudal, and the great toe extends at right angles to the other toes, and is not longer than the other toes, but shorter, as in the ape.

These facts are unmistakable. There is a reason for everything, and there is a reason for these transformations through which each generation of living beings journeys. The individual passes through them because the species to which he belongs has passed through them. They represent ancestral wanderings. As if to emphasise the kinship of all of life's forms and to render incontrovertible the fact of universal evolution, Nature compels every individual to commence existence at the same place, and to recapitulate in his individual evolution the phylogenetic journeyings of his species.

For reasons which it is not necessary to mention here, biologists believe that insects all originated from a common parental form, with two pairs of wings and six legs. Insects all retain their original allowance of legs, but in many species one or the other pair of wings has become more or less degenerated. In the whole order of flies the back pair of wings is represented by a couple of insignificant knobs. In the Strepsiptera, a sub-order of beetles, the front-wings are similarly reduced, being mere twisted filaments. Many parasites, such as fleas and ticks, whose mode of life renders organs of aerial locomotion unnecessary, are entirely wingless. The insects of small isolated islands are also largely without wings, the proportion of wingless species being much larger than among insects inhabiting continents. This is due to their greater liability on small land masses of being carried out to sea and drowned, owing to the feebleness and uncertainty of insect flight. On the island of Madeira, out of the 550 species found there, 220 species no longer have the power of flight.

Air-breathing animals--amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals--have normally a pair of lungs--a right one and a left one. But in snakes and snake-like lizards, where the body is very slender and elongated, only one lung, sometimes the right one, and sometimes the left, is fully developed. The right ovary is likewise aborted in all birds, the left one yielding all the eggs. The swifts and frigate birds live almost their whole lives long on the wing, and the legs of these birds have grown so short and weak and rudimentary, as a result of their constant life in the air, that they can scarcely walk. The chimney swift is said never to alight anywhere except on the sooty inner walls of the chimney where its nest is. Its food consists of insects which it gathers in the air, and the few dead twigs used in making its nest are nipped from the tree while the bird continues its flight. The ostriches, cassowaries, and many other birds, have, on the other hand, developed their legs at the expense of their wings. The ostrich is said to be able to outrun the horse, but it has no power of flight, although it has wings and wing muscles, and even the skin-folds covering the wings corresponding to those of birds that fly. But its whole flying apparatus is in ruins. The rudimentary hind-toe of birds is a vestigial organ, and so are the claws which appear on the thumb and first finger of all young birds. So also are the rudiments of eyes in cave crickets, fishes, and other inhabitants of total darkness. The flounder and other so-called flat fishes swim straight up, as ordinary fishes do, when young. But as they grow they incline more and more to one side, and finally swim entirely on their side, the eye on the lower side migrating around, and joining the other on the upper side of the head.

About the first thing a human infant does on coming into the world is to prove its arboreal origin by grasping and spitefully clinging to everything that stimulates its palms. A little peeperless babe an hour old can perform feats of strength with its hands and arms that many men and women cannot equal. It can support the entire weight of its body for several seconds hanging by its hands. Dr. Robinson, an English physician, found as a result of sixty experiments on as many infants, more than half of whom were less than an hour old, that with two exceptions every babe was able to hang to the finger or to a small stick, and sustain the whole weight of the body for at least ten seconds. Twelve of those just born held on for nearly a minute. At the age of two or three weeks, when this power is greatest, several succeeded in sustaining themselves for over a minute and a half, two for over two minutes, and one for two minutes and thirty-five seconds. The young ape for some weeks after birth clings tenaciously to its mother's neck and hair, and the instinct of the child to cling to objects is probably a survival of the instinct of the young ape. I believe it is Wallace who relates somewhere an incident which illustrates the instinct of the young simian to cling to something. Wallace had captured a young ape, and was carrying it to camp, when the little fellow happened to get its hands on the naturalist's whiskers, which it mistook, evidently, for the hirsute property of its mother, and, driven by the powerful instinct of self-preservation, it hung on to them so desperately it could scarcely be pulled loose. Many mammals are provided with a well-developed muscular apparatus for the manipulation of their ears. But in man there does not exist the same necessity for auricular detection of enemies, and while these muscles still exist, and are capable of being used to a slight extent by occasional individuals, they are generally so emaciated as to be useless.

Another vestigial organ in the body of man, and one of significance from the standpoint of morphology, is the tail. The tail is an exceedingly unpopular part of the human anatomy, most men and women being unwilling to admit that they have such an appendage. But many a person who has hitherto dozed in ignorance on this matter has learned with considerable dismay, when he has for the first time looked upon the undraped lineaments of the human skeleton, that man actually has a tail. It consists of three or four small vertebrae, more or less fused, at the posterior end of the spinal column. That this is really a rudimentary tail is proved beyond a doubt by the fact that in the embryo it is highly developed, being longer than the limbs, and is provided with a regular muscular apparatus for wagging it. These caudal muscles are generally represented in grown-up people by bands of fibrous tissue, but cases are known where the actual muscles have persisted through life.

The nictitating membrane, which in birds and many reptiles consists of a half-transparent curtain acting as a lid to sweep the eye, is in the human eye dwindled to a small membranous remnant, draped at the inner corner. The growth of hair over the human body surface may be regarded, in view of the sartorial habits of man, as a vestigial inheritance from hairy ancestors. One of the most notorious of the vestigial organs of man is the vermiform appendix, a small slender sac opening from the large intestine near where the large intestine is joined by the small intestine. In some animals this organ is large and performs an important part in the process of digestion. But in man it is a mere rudiment, not only of no possible aid in digestion, but the source of frequent disease, and even of death.

There are in all, according to Darwin, about eighty vestigial organs in the human body. But these organs occur everywhere throughout the animal kingdom. There is not an order of animals, nor of plants either, without them. They are necessary facts growing out of evolution. Organic structures are the result of adjustment to surrounding conditions. The continual changes in environment to which all organisms are exposed necessitate corresponding changes in structure. And the vestiges found in the bodies of all animals represent parts which in the previous existence were useful and necessary to a complete adjustment of the organism, but which, owing to a change of emphasis in surroundings, have become useless, and consequently shrunken. They are the obsolete or obsolescent parts of animal structure--parts which have been outgrown and superseded--the 'silent letters' of morphology. They sustain the same relation to the individual organism as dead or dwindling species sustain to a fauna. They furnish indisputable proof of the kinship and unity of the animal world.

Lombock Strait, a narrow neck of water between Bali and Lombock Island, and Macassar Strait, separating Celebes from Borneo, are parts of a continuous passage of water which in remote times separated two continents--an Indo-Malayan continent to which belonged Borneo, Sumatra, Java, and the Malay Peninsula; and an Austro-Malayan continent, now represented by Australia, Celebes, the Moluccas, New Guinea, Solomon's Islands, etc. Wallace first announced this ancient boundary, and it has been called 'Wallace's line.' He was led to infer its existence by the fact which he observed as he travelled about from island to island, that, while the faunas of these two regions are as wholes very different from each other, the faunas of the various land patches in each area have a wonderful similarity. Australia is a veritable museum of old and obsolete forms of both plants and animals. Its fauna and flora are made up prevailingly of forms such as have on the other continents long been superseded by more specialised species. No true mammals, excepting men and a few rats, lived in Australia when Englishmen first went there. The most powerful animals were the comparatively helpless marsupials. The explanation of these remarkable facts is probably this: The Australian continent, which formerly included New Guinea and other islands to the north, has not been connected with the other land masses for a very long period of time. The development upon the other continents of the more powerful mammals, especially of the ungulates and the carnivora, resulted in the extermination of the more helpless forms from most of the earth's surface. But Australia, protected by its isolation, has retained to this day its old-fashioned forms of life, neither land animals nor plants having been able to navigate the intervening straits. This supposition is strengthened by the fact that fossil remains of marsupials are to-day found scattered all over the world, while, with the exception of the American opossums, living marsupials are found only in Australia and its islands. There is to-day not a single survivor of these once-numerous races in either Europe, Asia, or Africa. Similar facts of distribution are furnished by the lemurs--those small, monkey-like animals with fox faces, which are sometimes called 'half-apes,' since they are supposed to be the link connecting the true apes with lower forms. Fossil lemurs are found in both America and Europe, but lemurs are now extinct in both continents. Those of America were probably exterminated by the carnivora, who are known to be very fond of monkey meat of all kinds. The European lemurs seem to have migrated southward into eastern Africa at a time when Madagascar formed a part of the mainland. 'There they have been isolated, and have developed in a fashion comparable to that which has occurred in the case of the Australian marsupials. Of fifty living species, thirty are confined to Madagascar, and the lemurs are there exceedingly numerous in individuals. Outside of Madagascar they only maintain a precarious footing in forests or on islands, and are usually few in number'.

If the earth were peopled by migrations from Ararat, it would require a good deal of intellectual legerdemain to show why the sloths are confined to South America and the monotremes to Australia and its islands. The reindeer of northern Europe and Asia, and the elk and caribou of Arctic America, are so much alike they must have descended from a common ancestry, and been developed into distinct species since the separation of North America and Eurasia. The same thing is probably also true of the puma and jaguar, who inhabit the middle latitudes of the New World, and the lion, tiger, and leopard, occupying like latitudes of the Old World. They all belong to the cat family, and represent divergences from a common feline type of structure. The camel does not exist normally outside of northern Africa and central and western Asia. And when the camel-like llama of South America first became known to zoologists, it was a problem how this creature could have become separated so far from the apparent origin of the camel family. But since then fossil camels have been found all over both North and South America. And it has even been suspected that perhaps America was the original home of the camel, and that, like the horse, the camel migrated to the eastern hemisphere at a time when the eastern and western land masses were connected. The foxes, hares, and other mammals of the upper Alps, also many Alpine plants, are like those of the Arctic regions. The most probable explanation of these resemblances is that these Alpine species climbed up into these inhospitable altitudes, and were left stranded here on this island of cold, when their relatives, on the return of warmth at the close of the glacial period, retreated back to the ice-bound fastnesses around the pole. It is for a similar reason, probably, that the flora of the upper White Mountains resembles that of Labrador.

Three-fourths of the surface of the earth is sea. Over the surface of the remaining fourth, excepting in mountainous places, is a layer of soil, varying from a few feet to a few hundred feet in depth. Beneath this coverlet of soil, extending as far as man has penetrated into the earth, is rock. Excepting in regions overflowed by lava poured out from beneath, or along the backbones of continents where the surface rocks have been upheaved into folds and carried away by denudation, the rocks immediately beneath the soil, to a thickness often of thousands of feet, are in the form of layers, or sheets, arranged one above another. These rocks are called sedimentary rocks, as distinguished from the unlaminated rocks of the interior. They have been formed at the bottom of the sea, and have, hence, all been formed since the condensation of the oceans. They have been formed out of the detritus of continents brought down by the rivers and the accumulated remains of animal and vegetal forms which have slowly settled down through the waters. They are the successive cemeteries of the dead past. Such rocks are now forming over the floors of all oceans--forming just as they have formed throughout the long eons of geological history. Along the axes of ancient mountains and in deep-cut canyons the rock layers are exposed to a thickness of thousands of feet, in some cases thirty or forty thousand feet. Here they lie, piled up, one on top of another, the great, broad pages upon which are written the long, dark story of our planet. It is the mightiest and most everlasting of all annals--the autobiography of a world. It is possible, by studying these rock records, to know not only the kind of life that lived in each age, but a good deal regarding the conditions in which that life lived and passed away. Just as the naturalist is able, from a single bone of an unknown animal, to reconstruct the entire animal and to infer something of its surroundings and habits of life, and as the archeologist, by going back to the graves of deceased races and digging up the dust upon which these races wrought, is able to tell much of their history and characteristics, so the geologist, by studying the bones of those more distant civilisations, the civilisations sandwiched among the fossiliferous rocks, is able to know, not only just the kind of life that lived in each age, but, by comparing the species of successive strata, can construct with astonishing fulness the genealogical outline of the entire life process. The succession of life forms as they appear in the rocks, with a sketch of their probable genealogy, is traced elsewhere in this chapter. It is only necessary to say here that the order in which the forms of life appear in the sedimentary strata is that of a gradually increasing complexity. The invertebrates appear first; then the fishes, the lowest of the vertebrates; after these come the amphibians; following these the reptiles; and finally the birds and mammals.

It is an important fact that the types of structure forming any series grow more and more generalised as the distance from the present increases, and that different lines of development, when traced back into the past, often converge in types which combine the main characters of various existing groups. The horses, rhinoceroses, and tapirs, great as are the differences among them now, can be traced back step by step through fossil forms, their differences gradually becoming less marked, until 'the lines ultimately blend together, if not in one common ancestor, at all events into forms so closely alike in all essentials that no reasonable doubt can be held as to their common origin.' 'The four chief orders of the higher mammals--the primates, ungulates, carnivora, and rodents--seem to be separated by profound gulfs, when we confine our attention to the representatives of to-day. But these gulfs are completely closed, and the sharp distinctions of the four orders are entirely lost, when we go back and compare their extinct predecessors of the Cenozoic period, who lived at least three million years ago. There we find the great sub-class of the placentals, which to-day comprises more than two thousand five hundred species, represented by only a small number of insignificant pro-placentals, in which the characters of the four divergent orders are so intermingled and toned down that we cannot in reason do other than consider them as the precursors of those features. The oldest primates, the oldest ungulates, the oldest carnivora, and the oldest rodents, all have the same skeletal structure and the same typical dentition as these pro-placentals; all are characterised by the small and imperfect structure of the brain, especially of the cortex, its chief part, and all have short legs and five-toed, flat-soled feet. In many cases among these oldest placentals it was at first very difficult to say whether they should be classed with the primates, ungulates, carnivora, or rodents, so very closely and confusedly do these four groups, which diverge so widely afterwards, approach each other at that time. Their common origin from a single ancestral group follows incontestably'.

There are something over 150 different varieties of the domestic pigeon. Some of these varieties--as many as a dozen, Mr. Darwin thinks--differ from each other sufficiently to be reckoned, if they are considered solely with reference to their structures, as entirely distinct species. The carrier, for instance, the giant of the pigeons, measures 17 inches from bill-tip to the end of its tail, and has a beak 1 3/4 inches long. Around each eye is a large dahlia-like wattle, and another large wattle is on the beak, giving the beak the appearance of having been thrust through the kernel of a walnut. The tumbler is small, squatty, and almost beakless. It has the preposterous habit of rising high in the air and then tumbling heels over head. The roller, one of the many varieties of the tumbler, descends to the ground in a series of back somersaults, executed so rapidly that it looks like a falling ball. The runt is large, weighing sometimes as much as the carrier. The fantail has thirty or forty feathers in its tail, while all other varieties have only twelve or fourteen, the normal number for birds. The trumpeter, so named on account of its peculiar coo, has an umbrella-like hood of feathers covering its head and face, and its feet are so heavily feathered that they look like little wings. In the correct specimens of this variety the feathers have to be clipped from the face before the birds can see to feed themselves. The pouter has the absurd habit of inflating its gullet to a prodigious size, and the Jacobin wears a gigantic ruff. The homing pigeon has such a strong attachment for its cote that it will travel hundreds of miles, sometimes as many as 1,400 miles, in order to reach the home from which it has been separated. But it is not simply in their colour, size, habits, and plumage, that pigeons vary. There are corresponding differences in their structures, in the number of their ribs and vertebrae, in the shape and size of the skull, in the bones of the face, in the development of the breast-bone, and in the length of the neck, legs, and bill. Pigeons also differ in the shape and size of their eggs, and in their dispositions and voice. 'There is,' says Huxley in summing up his discussion of the great variety in these birds, 'hardly a particular of either internal economy or external shape which has not by selective breeding been perpetuated and become the foundation of a new race'.

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