Initiative in Evolution

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by Darwin, Wallace and Romanes, and these suggested to me twenty years ago the following line o

es, especially the orang, in whom its fully-developed form was an adapta-tion governed by Natural Selection. Of the three, Wallace is the most uncompromising on behalf of this view, Romanes rather accepts it en passant, and Darwin in a long passage43 adopts it with some reserve and his usual re

ow, as Arthur, the legendary Celtic hero, was formerly held to be an historical personage more than is the case now. These

nt umbrella, but one may doubt very much if so clever a denizen of the tropics would fail to find under the great branches of trees, in a tropical forest, a better covering and one more like the roofs of our houses. But when we cannot find a roof to our heads we-and the orang or gorilla-naturally employ a substitute,

time in this dull manner? and was the running-off of rain so frequent and imp

position to go beyond speculations, and this one seems barely credible,

f the I

which every man can find, if he looks for it, on his own forearm. I examined a large number of apes and monkeys so as to test the theory, and the results were published in Nature, Vol. 55, under the title "Certain vestigial characters in Man." Suffice it to say that from the evidence I b

r-Slope in certain Typical Mammals," and after this came a paper at the same Society

hed and others at the Zoological Society, in which different regions of the hairy coat of man and lower mammals were dea

wo or three unimportant details, the results and conclusions in the book and papers of an earlier date. The connec-tion between the habits of an animal and the distribu-tio

is Arranged o

e main lines in which the hair-streams flow. The front or flexor surfaces in the lemur and ape are not shown because they are precisely like the corresponding back surfaces, and the flexor surface in man is shown in the figure. The figures are so much like diagrams that a very little detailed descrip-tion will suffice. Fo

two streams, one passing to the outer and the other to the inner border in a downward gentle curve, and they join the

hairy mammals. The figure shows the eccentric course taken by the hair on the back surface. In the centr

leaders saw their chance of claiming for Selection a tiny bit of territory, a kind of Duchy of Luxe

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ment of Hair o

r and thicker than those of man, and both on the f

hairs point from th

ur, who remains to-day among the most Chinese or unchanging of known mammals. In his illuminating work, Prehistoric Man and History, Professor Scott Elliott adopts an excellent term, "lemur-monkey-man," to sum up, without missing links, the long ancestry of man. I take the liberty of adapting this term more closely to the present inquiry and use that of lemur-ape-man instead, for whatever may be the relation of man to present apes some ape-like ancestors enter into his genealogical tree.45 For my purpose the monkey

r is a good example, and I venture, greatly daring, to call this the normal slope of hair. Somewhere and somehow in the human

ginning their innova-tion perhaps, with

ics of Ha

from a papilla at its base. As the hair grows, its free end is pushed away from the papilla at the rate of one inch in two months. This is the rate in man's hair, and it is probably greater in the case of lower mammals on account of the greater importance and physiological activity of their hairy coat than in man's

river, a glacier or molten lava, for the base of the hair is fixed. But it will serve, and is at least not more open to objection than certain useful metaphors in biology as when the genealogy of man and animals is pictured as a tree, or the living things of the earth as a "web of life." It is, then, as streams moving at the rate of one inch in two months in the lines of least resistan

has been steeped in thoughts of warfare for five years. We are all soldiers now; we think in terms of military affairs. In th

t War, Italy was not at one p

sary. The critic may call these "battles of kites and crows," and ask What war correspondents were allowed to describe them; but a battle, whether great or small, long or short, is important to the parties concerned, and it is open to us to "reconstruct" the facts of the battle as do the historians on their part, for example, Sir James Ramsay the battle of Agincourt-with tolerable verisimilitude. But in science, especially geological science, the process of reconstruc-tion is much more ambitious and bold than any that is here attempted. Who has not been fascinated, if he has read Sir E. Ray Lankester's work on Extinct Animals, by the skill and daring with which he conveys to us a vivid idea of the form and mode of life, with scanty data, of the extinct Moa of New Zealand, the great Pterodactyle, Pteranodon, or the Diprotodon of Owen-"the probable appearance in life" of thes

explaining changes in the surface of the earth by reference to causes now in action. The objection that one subject is very great and the other very small is not valid; for one as much as the other there are millions of years to be had for the asking. Who in th

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denburg, well called Marshal Rückwarts? The problem lies open in the Figure and receiving no aid from Selection or survival of the fittest, in this little effort, he had to fall back on the eternal and tedious force of habit and use. I am afraid if here I were interrupted by some critic, more learned

until some primitive form of monkey, gradually evolving into a primitive ape, brings into the family new habits and customs. Other men and other manners appear in the Miocene Age. Our supposed Dryopithecus fontani becomes more upright in his bodily, and perhaps his moral habits, and spends an increasing amount of his leisure

n the orang. In course of milleniums the ancient forces yielded to those of the new armies, and the once normal slope became reversed in a way which shocked the conservative lemurs of his day. It requires little imagina-tion to see how the lengthening thickening hairs on this limb-segment became changed in their direction by friction against the opposing surfaces of the thighs, by gravita-tion, and the frequent

Ape t

erted to that of the lemur on the front and sides of his forearm. This is clearly shown in Figure 1. There also you see graphically recorded in the hair of the extensor border of the ulna, a little backward streak, a poor little legacy

idea of him sitting asleep in raging gales, in driving rain which is neatly conducted by the thatch of his hair off his skin. As far as it goes this need not be questioned, as a matter of probabil

e protec-tion theory (under the empire of Selection) is again in straits. But I must not forget my self-denying ordinance alluded to in the Preface, but will show how the ape fashion began to be modified into its present and probably final form in man. Still further changes in the simple habits of the earliest men became frequent, and fresh forces were organised in our mimic battlefield. Gravita-tion gradually ceased to act as the hairs became thinner and shorter. Friction and pressure changed their lines of incidence with the increasing tendenc

ittle empires such as here engage our attention, and I make no apology for this to the reader who has gone thus far with me, for, on the principl

vestige" and "normal," and a few remarks upon them are not out of place

o it in a large number of obsolete structures of animal forms. But vestiges, footsteps, footprints, have another and equally correct meaning, even if less often thus employed, in the fact that a vestige or footprint may just as well be a relic of what the race and individuals

use-to his adversary. A norm for him exists only as one of Professor Karl Pearson's "conceptual counters," a piece of mental shorthand or hardly more than a pis aller. Among the fundamental conceptions of organic evolution there is one which is almost a truism, the doctrine of Heraclitus, π?ντα ρε?ι, the everlasting flux and change of Nature and her products. In strict logic, accordin

, who is not unlike a certain great Church, which grants nothing to her adversaries but is not averse from taking. In his Grammar of Science, written with a pen dipped in hydrochloric acid, Professor Karl Pearson four times over, and perhaps more, has the courage to call the human brain in this twentieth century "normal." Has he never heard of the coming Superman of Mr. Bernard Shaw and other prophets? Thinking sub specie aeternitatis has he here in the West, and at a certain small epoch of time, any right to call the human brain "normal