Chapter XIII: Part 13

Unlike the gorilla, which attacks man with peculiar malignity, and the chimpanzee, which when in large troops assails those who approach its retreats, the orang, even in its adult state, seems not to be dangerous unless attacked. Even then he does not always show great ferocity. The two following anecdotes illustrate well its character. The first is from the pen of Dr. Abel Clarke (fifth volume of the “Asiatic Researches”); the other is from Wallace’s interesting work, “The Malay Archipelago.” An orang-outang fully seven feet high was discovered by the company of a merchant ship, at a place called Ramboon, on the north-west coast of Sumatra, on a spot where there were few trees and little cultivated ground. “It was evident that he had come from a distance, for his legs were covered with mud up to the knees, and the natives were unacquainted with him. On the approach of the boat’s crew he came down from the tree in which he was discovered, and made for a clump at some distance; exhibiting, as he moved, the appearance of a tall man-like figure, covered with shining brown hair, walking erect, with a waddling gait, but sometimes accelerating his motion with his hands, and occasionally impelling himself forward with the bough of a tree. His motion on the ground was evidently not his natural mode of progression, for, even when assisted by his hands and the bough, it was slow and vacillating; it was necessary to see him among the trees to estimate his strength and agility. On being driven to a small clump, he gained by one spring a very lofty branch and bounded from one branch to another with the swiftness of a common monkey, his progress being as rapid as that of a swift horse. After receiving five balls his exertions relaxed, and, reclining exhausted against a branch, he vomited a quantity of blood. The ammunition of the hunters being by this time exhausted, they were obliged to fell the tree in order to obtain him; but what was their surprise to see him, as the tree was falling, effect his retreat to another, with seemingly undiminished vigour! In fact, they were obliged to cut down all the trees before they could force him to combat his enemies on the ground, and when finally overpowered by numbers, and nearly in a dying state, he seized a spear made of supple wood, which would have withstood the strength of the stoutest man, and broke it like a reed. It was stated, by those who aided in his death, that the human-like expression of his countenance and his piteous manner of placing his hands over his wounds, distressed their feelings so as almost to make them question the nature of the act they were committing. He was seven feet high, with a broad expanded chest and narrow waist. His chin was fringed with a beard that curled neatly on each side, and formed an ornamental rather than a frightful appendage to his visage. His arms were long even in proportion to his height, but his legs were much shorter. Upon the whole, he was a wonderful beast to behold, and there was more about him to excite amazement than fear. His hair was smooth and glossy, and his whole appearance showed him to be in the full vigour of his youth and strength.” On the whole, the narrative seems to suggest a remark similar to one applied by Washington Irving to the followers of Ojeda and their treatment of the (so-called) Indians of South America, “we confess we feel a momentary doubt whether the arbitrary appellation of ‘brute’ is always applied to the right party.”

The other story also presents man as at least as brutal as the orang concerned in the event. “A few miles down the river,” says Wallace, “there is a Dyak house, and the inhabitants saw a large orang feeding on the young shoots of a palm by the river-side. On being alarmed he retreated towards the jungle which was close by, and a number of the men, armed with spears and choppers, ran out to intercept him. The man who was in front tried to run his spear through the animal’s body; but the orang seized it in his hands, and in an instant got hold of the man’s arm, which he seized in his mouth, making his teeth meet in the flesh above the elbow, which he tore and lacerated in a dreadful manner. Had not the others been close behind, the man would have been more seriously injured, if not killed, as he was quite powerless; but they soon destroyed the creature with their spears and choppers. The man remained ill for a long time, and never fully recovered the use of his arm.”

The term gibbon includes several varieties of tail-less, long-armed, catarhine apes. The largest variety, called the siamang, need alone be described here.

The siamang inhabits Sumatra. It presents several points of resemblance to the orang-outang, but is also in several respects strongly distinguished from that animal. The arms are longer even than the orang’s, and the peculiar use which the orang makes of his long arms is more strikingly shown in the progression of the long-armed siamang, for the body inclining slightly forward, when the animal is on level ground the long arms are used somewhat like crutches, and they advance by jerks resembling the hobbling of a lame man whom fear compels to make an extraordinary effort. The skull is small, and much more depressed than that of the orang or chimpanzee. The face is naked and black, straggling red hairs marking the eyebrows. The eyes are deeply sunk, a peculiarity which, by the way, seems characteristic of arboreal creatures generally;[37] the nose broad and flat, with wide-open nostrils; the cheeks sunk under high cheekbones; the chin almost rudimentary. “The hair over the whole body is thick, long, and of a glossy black colour, much closer on the shoulders, back, and limbs than on the belly, which, particularly in the females, is nearly naked. The ears are entirely concealed by the hair of the head; they are naked, and, like all the other naked parts, of a deep black colour. Beneath the chin there is a large, bare sac, of a lax and oily appearance, which is distended with air when the animal cries, and in that state resembles an enormous goitre. It is similar to that possessed by the orang-outang, and undoubtedly assists in swelling the volume of the voice, and producing those astounding cries which, according to Duvancelle’s account, may be heard at the distance of several miles.” This, however, may be doubted, for M. Duvancelle himself remarks of the wouwou, that, “though deprived of the guttural sac so remarkable in the siamang, its cry is very nearly the same; so that it would appear that this organ does not produce the effect of increasing the sound usually attributed to it, or else that it must be replaced in the wouwou by some analogous formation.”

The habits of the siamang are interesting, especially in their bearing on the relationship between the various orders of anthropoid apes and man; for, though the gibbon is unquestionably the lowest of the four orders of the anthropoid apes in intelligence, it possesses some characteristics which bring it nearer to man (so far as they are concerned) than any of its congeners. The chief authorities respecting the ways of the siamang are the French naturalists Diard and Duvancelle, and the late Sir Stamford Raffles.

The siamangs generally assemble in large troops, “conducted, it is said, by a chief, whom the Malays believe to be invulnerable, probably because he is more agile, powerful, and difficult to capture than the rest.” “Thus united,” proceeds M. Duvancelle (in a letter addressed to Cuvier), “the siamangs salute the rising and the setting sun with the most terrific cries” (like sun-worshippers), “which may be heard at the distance of many miles, and which, when near, stun when they do not frighten. This is the morning call of the mountain Malays; but to the inhabitants of the town, who are unaccustomed to it, it is an unsupportable annoyance. By way of compensation, the siamangs keep a profound silence during the day, unless when interrupted in their repose or their sleep. They are slow and heavy in their gait, wanting confidence when they climb and agility when they leap, so that they may be easily caught when they can be surprised. But nature, in depriving them of the means of readily escaping danger, has endowed them with a vigilance which rarely fails them; and if they hear a noise which is unusual to them, even at the distance of a mile, fright seizes them and they immediately take flight. When surprised on the ground, however, they may be captured without resistance, either overwhelmed with fear or conscious of their weakness and the impossibility of escaping. At first, indeed, they endeavour to avoid their pursuers by flight, and it is then that their want of skill in this exercise becomes most apparent.”

“However numerous the troop may be, if one is wounded it is immediately abandoned by the rest, unless, indeed, it happen to be a young one. Then the mother, who either carries it or follows close behind, stops, falls with it, and, uttering the most frightful cries, precipitates herself upon the common enemy with open mouth and arms extended. But it is manifest that these animals are not made for combat; they neither know how to deal nor to shun a blow. Nor is their maternal affection displayed only in moments of danger. The care which the females bestow upon their offspring is so tender and even refined, that one would be almost tempted to attribute the sentiment to a rational rather than an instinctive process. It is a curious and interesting spectacle, which a little precaution has sometimes enabled me to witness, to see these females carry their young to the river, wash their faces in spite of their outcries, wipe and dry them, and altogether bestow upon their cleanliness a time and attention that in many cases the children of our own species might well envy. The Malays related a fact to me, which I doubted at first, but which I consider to be in a great measure confirmed by my own subsequent observations. It is that the young siamangs, whilst yet too weak to go alone, are always carried by individuals of their own sex, by their fathers if they are males, and by their mothers if females. I have also been assured that these animals frequently become the prey of the tiger, from the same species of fascination which serpents are said to exercise over birds, squirrels, and other small animals. Servitude, however long, seems to have no effect in modifying the characteristic defects of this ape—his stupidity, sluggishness, and awkwardness. It is true that a few days suffice to make him as gentle and contented as he was before wild and distrustful; but, constitutionally timid, he never acquires the familiarity of other apes, and even his submission appears to be rather the result of extreme apathy than of any degree of confidence or affection. He is almost equally insensible to good or bad treatment; gratitude and revenge are equally strange to him.”

We have next to consider certain points connected with the theory of the relationship between man and the anthropoid apes. It is hardly necessary for me to say, perhaps, that in thus dealing with a subject requiring for its independent investigation the life-long study of departments of science which are outside those in which I have taken special interest, I am not pretending to advance my opinion as of weight in matters as yet undetermined by zoologists. But it has always seemed to me, that when those who have made special study of a subject collect and publish the result of their researches, and a body of evidence is thus made available for the general body scientific, the facts can be advantageously considered by students of other branches of science, so only that, in leaving for a while their own subject, they do not depart from the true scientific method, and that they are specially careful to distinguish what has been really ascertained from what is only surmised with a greater or less degree of probability.

In the first place, then, I would call attention to some very common mistakes respecting the Darwinian theory of the Descent of Man. I do not refer here to ordinary misconceptions respecting the theory of natural selection. To say the truth, those who have not passed beyond _this_ stage of error,—those who still confound the theory of natural selection with the Lamarckian and other theories (or rather hypotheses[38]) of evolution,—are not as yet in a position to deal with our present subject, and may be left out of consideration.

The errors to which I refer are in the main included in the following statement. It is supposed by many, perhaps by most, that according to Darwin man is descended from one or other of the races of anthropoid apes; and that the various orders and sub-orders of apes and monkeys at present existing can be arranged in a series gradually approaching more and more nearly to man, and indicating the various steps (or some of them, for gaps exist in the series) by which man was developed. Nothing can be plainer, however, than Darwin’s contradiction of this genealogy for the human races. Not only does he not for a moment countenance the belief that the present races of monkeys and apes can be arranged in a series gradually approximating more and more nearly to man, not only does he reject the belief that man is descended from any present existing anthropoid ape, but he even denies that the progenitor of man resembled any known ape. “We must not fall into the error of supposing,” he says, “that the early progenitor of the whole simian stock, including man, was identical with, or even closely resembled, any existing ape or monkey.”

It appears to me, though it may seem somewhat bold to express this opinion of the views of a naturalist so deservedly eminent as Mr. Mivart, that in his interesting little treatise, “Man and Apes,”—a treatise which may be described as opposed to Darwin’s special views but not generally opposed to the theory of evolution,—he misapprehends Darwin’s position in this respect. For he arrives at the conclusion that if the Darwinian theory is sound, then “low down” (_i.e._, far remote) “in the scale of Primates” (tri-syllabic) “was an ancestral form so like man that it might well be called an _homunculus_; and we have the virtual pre-existence of man’s body supposed, in order to account for the actual first appearance of that body as we know it—a supposition manifestly absurd if put forward as an explanation.”[39]

How, then, according to the Darwinian theory, is man related to the monkey? The answer to this question is simply that the relationship is the same in kind, though not the same in degree, as that by which the most perfect Caucasian race is related to the lowest race of Australian, or Papuan, or Bosjesman savages. No one supposes that one of these races of savages could by any process of evolution, however long-continued, be developed into a race resembling the Caucasian in bodily and mental attributes. Nor does any one suppose that the savage progenitor of the Caucasian races was identical with, or even closely resembled, any existing race of savages. Yet we recognize in the lowest forms of savage man our blood relations. In other words, it is generally believed that if our genealogy, and that of any existing race of savages, could be traced back through all its reticulations, we should at length reach a race whose blood we share with that race. It is also generally believed (though for my own part I think the logical consequences of the principle underlying all theories of evolution is in reality opposed to the belief) that, by tracing the genealogical reticulations still further back, we should at length arrive at a single race from which all the present races of man and no other animals have descended. The Darwinian faith with respect to men and monkeys is precisely analogous. It is believed that the genealogy of every existent race of monkeys, if traced back, would lead us to a race whose blood we share with that race of monkeys; and—which is at once a wider and a more precise proposition—that, as Darwin puts it, “the two main divisions of the Simiadæ, namely, the catarhine and platyrhine monkeys, with their sub-groups, have all proceeded from some one extremely ancient progenitor.” This proposition is manifestly wider. I call it also more precise, because it implies, and is evidently intended by Darwin to signify, that from that extremely ancient progenitor no race outside the two great orders of Simiadæ have even partially _descended_, though other races share with the Simiadæ descent from some still more remote race of progenitors.

This latter point, however, is not related specially to the common errors respecting the Darwinian theory which I have indicated above, except in so far as it is a detail of the actual Darwinian theory. I would, in passing, point out that, like the detail referred to in connection with the relationship of the various races of man, this one is not logically deducible from the theory of evolution. In fact, I have sometimes thought that the principal difficulties of that theory arise from this unnecessary and not logically sound doctrine. I pointed out, rather more than three years ago, in an article “On some of our Blood Relations,” in a weekly scientific journal, that the analogy between the descent of races and the descent of individual members of any race, requires us rather to believe that the remote progenitor of the human race and the Simiadæ has had its share—though a less share—in the generation of other races related to these in more or less remote degrees. I may perhaps most conveniently present the considerations on which I based this conclusion, by means of a somewhat familiar illustration:—

Let us take two persons, brother and sister (whom let us call the pair A), as analogues of the human race. Then these two have four great-grandparents on the father’s side, and four on the mother’s side. All these may be regarded as equally related to the pair A. Now, let us suppose that the descendants of the four families of great-grandparents intermarry, no marriages being in any case made outside these families, and that the descendants in the same generation as the pair A are regarded as corresponding to the entire order of the Simiadæ, the pair A representing, as already agreed, the race of man, and all families outside the descendants of the four great-grandparental families corresponding to orders of animals more distantly related than the Simiadæ to man. Then we have what corresponds (so far as our illustration is concerned) to Darwin’s views respecting man and the Simiadæ, and animals lower in the scale of life. The first cousins of the pair A may be taken as representing the anthropoid apes; the second cousins as representing the lemurs or half-apes; the third cousins as representing the platyrhine or American apes. The entire family—including the pair A, representing man—is descended also, in accordance with the Darwinian view, from a single family of progenitors, no outside families sharing _descent_, though all share _blood_, with that family.

But manifestly, this is an entirely artificial and improbable arrangement in the case of families. The eight grandparents _might_ be so removed in circumstances from surrounding families—so much superior to them, let us say—that neither they nor any of their descendants would intermarry with these inferior families: and thus none of their great-grandchildren would share descent from some other stock contemporary with the great-grandparents; or—which is the same thing, but seen in another light—none of the contemporaries of the great-grandchildren would share descent from the eight grandparents. But so complete a separation of the family from surrounding families would be altogether exceptional and unlikely. For, even assuming the eight families to be originally very markedly distinguished from all surrounding families, yet families rise and fall, marry unequally, and within the range of a few generations a wide disparity of blood and condition appears among the descendants of any group of families. So that, in point of fact, the relations assumed to subsist between man, the Simiadæ, and lower animal forms, corresponds to an unusual and improbable set of relations among families of several persons. Either, then, the relations of families must be regarded as not truly analogous to the relations of races, which no evolutionist would assert, or else we must adopt a somewhat different view of the relationship between man, the Simiadæ, and inferior animals.

One other illustration may serve not only to make my argument clearer, but also, by presenting an actual case, to enforce the conclusion to which it points.

We know that the various races of man are related together more or less closely, that some are purer than others, and that one or two claim almost absolute purity. Now, if we take one of these last, as, for instance, the Jewish race, and trace the race backwards to its origin, we find it, according to tradition, carried back to twelve families, the twelve sons of Jacob and their respective wives. (We cannot go further back because the wives of Jacob’s sons must be taken into account, and they were not descended from Abraham or Isaac and their wives only,—in fact, could not have been.) If the descendants of those twelve families had never intermarried with outside families in such sort that the descendants of such mixed families came to be regarded as true Hebrews, we should have in the Hebrews a race corresponding to the Simiadæ as regarded by Darwin, _i.e._, a race entirely descended from one set of families, and so constituting, in fact, a single family. But we know that, despite the objections entertained by the Hebrews against the intermixture of their race with other races, this did not happen. Not only did many of those regarded as true Hebrews share descent from nations outside their own, but many of those regarded as truly belonging to nations outside the Jewish race shared descent from the twelve sons of Jacob.

The case corresponding, then, to that of the purest of all human races, and the case therefore most favourable to the view presented by Darwin (though very far from essential to the Darwinian theory), is simply this, that, in the first place, many animals regarded as truly Simiadæ share descent from animals outside that family which Darwin regards as the ape progenitor of man; and, in the second place, many animals regarded as outside the Simiadæ share descent from that ape-like progenitor. This involves the important inference that the ape-like progenitor of man was not so markedly differentiated from other families of animals then existing, that fertile intercourse was impossible. A little consideration will show that this inference accords well with, if it might not almost have been directly deduced from, the Darwinian doctrine that all orders of mammals were, in turn, descended from a still more remote progenitor race. The same considerations may manifestly be applied also to that more remote race, to the still more remote race from which all the vertebrates have descended, and so on to the source itself from which all forms of living creatures are supposed to have descended. A difficulty meets us at that remotest end of the chain analogous to the difficulty of understanding how life began at all; but we should profit little by extending the inquiry to these difficulties, which remain, and are likely long to remain, insuperable.

So far, however, are the considerations above urged from introducing any new or insuperable objection to the Darwinian theory, that, rightly understood, they indicate the true answer to an objection which has been urged by Mivart and others against the belief that man has descended from some ape-like progenitor.

Mivart shows that no existing ape or monkey approaches man more nearly in all respects than other races, but that one resembles man more closely in some respects, another in others, a third in yet others, and so forth. “The ear lobule of the gorilla makes him our cousin,” he says, “but his tongue is eloquent in his own dispraise.” If the “bridging convolutions of the orang[’s brain] go to sustain his claim to supremacy, they also go far to sustain a similar claim on the part of the long-tailed thumbless spider-monkeys. If the obliquely ridged teeth of _Simia_ and _Troglodytes_ (the chimpanzee) point to community of origin, how can we deny a similar community of origin, as thus estimated, to the howling monkeys and galagos? The liver of the gibbons proclaims them almost human; that of the gorilla declares him comparatively brutal. The lower American apes meet us with what seems the ‘front of Jove himself,’ compared with the gigantic but low-browed denizens of tropical Western Africa.”

He concludes that the existence of these wide-spread signs of affinity and the associated signs of divergence, disprove the theory that the structural characters existing in the human frame have had their origin in the influence of inheritance and “natural selection.” “In the words of the illustrious Dutch naturalists, Messrs. Schroeder, Van der Kolk and Vrolik,” he says, “the lines of affinity existing between different Primates construct rather a network than a ladder. It is indeed a tangled web, the meshes of which no naturalist has as yet unravelled by the aid of natural selection. Nay, more, these complex affinities form such a net for the use of the teleological _retiarius_ as it will be difficult for his Lucretian antagonist to evade, even with the countless turns and doublings of Darwinian evolutions.”

It appears to me that when we observe the analogy between the relationships of individuals, families, and races of man, and the relationships of the various species of animals, the difficulty indicated by Mr. Mivart disappears. Take, for instance, the case of the eight allied families above considered. Suppose, instead of the continual intermarriages before imagined—an exceptional order of events, be it remembered—that the more usual order of things prevails, viz., that alliances take place with other families. For simplicity, however, imagine that each married pair has two children, male and female, and that each person marries once and only once. Then it will be found that the pair A have ten families of cousins, two first-cousin families, and eight second-cousin families; these are all the families which share descent from the eight great-grandparents of the pair. (To have third-cousin families we should have to go back to the fourth generation.) Thus there are eleven families in all. Now, in the case first imagined of constant intermarrying, there would still have been eleven families, but they would all have descended from eight great-grandparents, and we should then expect to find among the eleven families various combinations, so to speak, of the special characteristics of the eight families from which they had descended. On the other hand, eleven families, in _no_ way connected, have descended from eighty-eight great-grandparents, and would present a corresponding variety of characteristics. But in the case actually supposed, in which the eleven families are so related that each one (for what applies to the pair A applies to the others) has two first-cousin families, and eight second-cousin families, it will be found that instead of 88 they have only 56 great-grandparents, or ancestors, in the third generation above them. The two families related as first cousins to the pair A have, like these, eight great-grandparents, four out of these eight for one family, being the four grandparents of the father of the pair A, the other four being outsiders; while four of the eight great-grandparents of the other family of first cousins are the four grandparents of the mother of the pair A, the other four being outsiders. The other eight families each have eight great-grandparents; two of the families having among their great-grandparents the parents of one of the grandfathers of the pair A, but no other great-grandparent in common with the pair A; other two of the eight families having among their great-grandparents the parents of the other grandfather of the pair A; other two having among their great-grandparents the parents of one of the grandmothers of the pair A; the remaining two families having among their great-grandparents the parents of the other grandmother of the pair A; while in all cases the six remaining great-grandparents of each family are outsiders, in no way related, on our assumption, either to the eight great-grandparents of the pair A or to each other, except as connected in pairs by marriage.

Now manifestly in such a case, which, save for the symmetry introduced to simplify its details, represents fairly the usual relationships between any family, its first cousins, and its second cousins, we should not expect to find any one of the ten other families resembling the pair A more closely in _all_ respects than would any other of the ten. The two first-cousin families would _on the whole_ resemble the pair A more nearly than would any of the other eight, but we should expect to find _some_ features or circumstances in which one or other or all of the second-cousin families would show a closer resemblance to one or other or both of the pair A. This is found often, perhaps generally, to be the case, even as respects the ordinary characteristics in which resemblance is looked for, as complexion, height, features, manner, disposition, and so forth. Much more would it be recognized, if such close investigation could be made among the various families as the naturalist can make into the characteristics of men and animals. The fact, then, that features of resemblance to man are found, not all in one order of the Simiadæ, but scattered among the various orders, is perfectly analogous with the laws of resemblance recognized among the various members of more or less closely related families.

The same result follows if we consider the analogy between various different species of animals on the one hand and between various races of the human family on the other. No one thinks of urging against the ordinary theory that men form only a single species, the objection that none of the other families of the human race can be regarded as the progenitor of the Caucasian family, seeing that though the Mongolian type is nearer in some respects, the Ethiopian is nearer in others, the American in others, the Malay in yet others. We find in this the perfect analogue of what is recognized in the relationships between families all belonging to one nation, or even to one small branch of a nation. Is it not reasonable, then, to find in the corresponding features of scattered resemblance observed among the various branches of the great Simian family, not the objection which Mivart finds against the theory of relationship, but rather what should be expected if that theory is sound, and therefore, _pro tanto_, a confirmation of the theory?

But now, in conclusion, let us briefly consider the great difficulty of the theory that man is descended from some ape-like, arboreal, speechless animal,—the difficulty of bridging over the wide gap which confessedly separates the lowest race of savages from the highest existing race of apes. After all that has been done to diminish the difficulty, it remains a very great one. It is quite true that what is going on at this present time shows how the gap has been widened, and therefore indicates how it may once have been comparatively small. The more savage races of man are gradually disappearing on the one hand, the most man-like apes are being destroyed on the other,—so that on both sides of the great gap a widening process is at work. Ten thousand years hence the least civilized human race will probably be little inferior to the average Caucasian races of the present day, the most civilized being far in advance of the most advanced European races of our time. On the other hand, the gorilla, the chimpanzee, the orang-outang, and the gibbon will probably be extinct or nearly so. True, the men of those days will probably have very exact records of the characteristics not only of the present savage races of man, but of the present races of apes. Nay, they will probably know of intermediate races, long since extinct even now, whose fossil remains geologists hope to discover before long as they have already discovered the remains of an ape as large as man (the _Dryopithecus_) which existed in Europe during the Miocene period;[40] and more recently the remains of a race of monkeys akin to Macacus, which once inhabited Attica. But although our remote descendants will thus possess means which we do not possess of bridging the gap between the highest races of apes and the lowest races of man, the gap will nevertheless be wider in their time. And tracing backwards the process, which, thus traced forward, shows a widened gap, we see that once the gap must have been much narrower than it is. Lower races of man than any now known once existed on the earth, and also races of apes nearer akin to man than any now existing, even if the present races of apes are not the degraded descendants of races which, living under more favourable conditions, were better developed after their kind than the gorilla, chimpanzee, orang, and gibbon of the present time.

It may be, indeed, that in the consideration last suggested we may find some assistance in dealing with our difficult problem. It is commonly assumed that the man-like apes are the most advanced members of the Simian family save man alone, and so far as their present condition is concerned this may be true. But it is not necessarily the case that the anthropoid apes have advanced to their present condition. Judging from the appearance of the young of these races, we may infer with some degree of probability that these apes are the degraded representatives of more intelligent and less savage creatures. Whereas the young of man is decidedly more savage in character than the well-nurtured and carefully trained adult, the young of apes are decidedly less savage than the adult. The same reasoning which leads us to regard the wildness, the natural cruelty, the destructiveness, the love of noise, and many other little ways of young children, as reminders of a more or less remote savage ancestry, should lead us to regard the comparative tameness and quiet of the young gorilla, for example, as evidence that in remote times the progenitors of the race were not so wild and fierce as the present race of gorillas.

But even when all such considerations, whether based on the known or the possible, have been taken into account, the gap between the lowest savage and the highest ape is not easily bridged. It is easier to see how man _may_ have developed from an arboreal, unspeaking animal to his present state, than to ascertain how any part of the development was actually effected; in other words, it is easier to suggest a general hypothesis than to establish an even partial theory.

That the progenitor of man was arboreal in his habits seems altogether probable. Darwin recognizes in the arrangement of the hair on the human forearm the strongest evidence on this point, so far as the actual body of man is concerned; the remaining and perhaps stronger evidence being derived from appearances recognized in the unborn child. He, who usually seems as though he could overlook nothing, seems to me to have overlooked a peculiarity which is even more strikingly suggestive of original arboreal habits. There is one set of muscles, and, so far as I know, one only, which the infant uses freely, while the adult scarcely uses them at all. I mean the muscles which separate the toes, and those, especially, which work the big toe. Very young children not only move the toes apart, so that the great toe and the little toe will be inclined to each other (in the plane of the sole) nearly ninety degrees, but also distinctly clutch with the toes. The habit has no relation to the child’s actual means of satisfying its wants. I have often thought that the child’s manner of clutching with its fingers is indicative of the former arboreal habits of the race, but it is not difficult to explain the action otherwise. The clutching movement of the toes, however, cannot be so explained. The child can neither bring food to its mouth in this way nor save itself from falling; and as the adult does not use the toes in this way the habit cannot be regarded as the first imperfect effort towards movements subsequently useful. In fact, the very circumstance that the movement is gradually disused shows that it is useless to the human child in the present condition of the race. In the very young gorilla the clutching motion of the toes is scarcely more marked than it is in a very young child; only in the gorilla the movement, being of use, is continued by the young, and is developed into that effective clutch with the feet which has been already described. Here we have another illustration of that divergency which, rather than either simple descent or ascent, characterizes the relationship between man and the anthropoid ape. In the growing gorilla a habit is more and more freely used, which is more and more completely given up by the child as he progresses towards maturity.

Probably the arboreal progenitor of man was originally compelled to abandon his arboreal habits by some slow change in the flora of his habitat, resulting in the diminution and eventual disappearance of trees suited for his movements. He would thus be compelled to adopt, at first, some such course as the chimpanzee—making huts of such branches and foliage as he could conveniently use for the purpose. The habit of living in large companies would (as in the case of the chimpanzee) become before long necessary, especially if the race or races thus driven from their former abode in the trees were, like the gibbons, unapt when alone both in attack and in defence. One can imagine how the use of vocal signals of various kinds would be of service to the members of these troops, not only in their excursions, but during the work of erecting huts or defences against their enemies. If in two generations the silent wild dog acquires, when brought into the company of domestic dogs, no less than five distinct barking signals, we can well believe that a race much superior in intelligence, and forced by necessity to associate in large bodies, would—in many hundreds of generations, perhaps—acquire a great number of vocal symbols. These at first would express various emotions, as of affection, fear, anxiety, sympathy, and so forth. Other signals would be used to indicate the approach of enemies, or as battle-cries. I can see no reason why gradually the use of particular vocal signs to indicate various objects, animate or inanimate, and various actions, should not follow after a while. And though the possession and use of many, even of many hundreds, of such signs would be very far from even the most imperfect of the languages now employed by savage races, one can perceive the possibility—which is all that at present we can expect to recognize—that out of such systems of vocal signalling a form of language might arise, which, undergoing slow and gradual development, should, in the course of many generations, approach in character the language of the lowest savage races. That from such a beginning language should attain its higher and highest developments is not more wonderful in kind, though much more wonderful, perhaps, in degree, than that from the first imperfect methods of printing should have arisen the highest known developments of the typographic art. The real difficulty lies in conceiving how mere vocal signalling became developed into what can properly be regarded as spoken language.

Of the difficulties related to the origin of, or rather the development of, man’s moral consciousness, space will not permit me to speak, even though there were much to be said beyond the admission that these difficulties have not as yet been overcome. It must be remembered, however, that races of men still exist whose moral consciousness can hardly be regarded as very fully developed. Not only so, but, through a form of reversion to savage types, the highest and most cultivated races of man bring forth from time to time (as our police reports too plainly testify) beings utterly savage, brutal, and even (“which is else”) bestial. Nay, the man is fortunate who has never had occasion to control innate tendencies to evil which are at least strongly significant of the origin of our race. To most minds it must be pleasanter as certainly it seems more reasonable, to believe that the evil tendencies of our race are manifestations of qualities undergoing gradual extinction, than to regard them as the consequences of one past offence, and so to have no reason for trusting in their gradual eradication hereafter. But, as Darwin says, in the true scientific spirit, “We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason allows us to discover it. We must acknowledge that man, with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his God-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system,—with all these exalted powers, man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” As it seems to me, man’s moral nature teaches the same lesson with equal, if not greater, significance.

_THE USE AND ABUSE OF FOOD._

Francis Bacon has laid it down as an axiom that experiment is the foundation of all real progress in knowledge. “Man,” he said, “as the minister and interpreter of nature, does and understands as much as his observations on the order of nature permit him, and neither knows nor is capable of more.”[41] It would seem, then, as if there could be no subject on which man should be better informed than on the value of various articles of food, and the quantity in which each should be used. On most branches of experimental inquiry, a few men in each age—perhaps but for a few ages in succession—have pursued for a longer or shorter portion of their life, a system of experiment and observation. But on the subject of food or diet all men in all ages have been practical experimenters, and not for a few years only, but during their entire life. One would expect, then, that no questions could be more decisively settled than those which relate to the use or the abuse of food. Every one ought to know, it might be supposed, what kinds of food are good for the health, in what quantity each should be taken, what changes of diet tend to correct this or that kind of ill-health, and how long each change should be continued.

Unfortunately, as we know, this is far from being the case. We all eat many things which are bad for us, and omit to eat many things which would be good for us. We change our diet, too often, without any consideration, or from false considerations, of the wants of the body. When we have derived benefit from some change of diet, we are apt to continue the new diet after the necessity for it has passed away. As to quantity, also, we seldom follow well-judged rules. Some take less nutriment (or less of some particular form of nutriment) than is needed to supply the absolute requirements of the system; others persistently overload the system, despite all the warnings which their own experience and that of others should afford of the mischief likely to follow that course.

It is only of late years that systematic efforts have been made to throw light on the subject of the proper use of food, to distinguish between its various forms, and to analyze the special office of each form. I propose to exhibit, in a popular manner, some of the more important practical conclusions to which men of science have been led by their investigations into these questions.

The human body has been compared to a lamp in which a flame is burning. In some respects the comparison is a most apt one, as we shall see presently. But man does more than _live_; he _works_,—with his brain or with his muscles. And therefore the human frame may be more justly compared to a steam-engine than to the flame of a lamp. Of mere life, the latter illustration is sufficiently apt, but it leaves unillustrated man’s capacity for work; and since food is taken with two principal objects—the maintenance of life and the renewal of material used up in brain work and muscular work—we shall find that the comparison of man to a machine affords a far better illustration of our subject than the more common comparisons of the life of man to a burning flame, and of food to the fuel which serves to maintain combustion.

There is, however, one class of food, and, perhaps, on the whole, the most important, the operation of which is equally well illustrated by either comparison. The sort of food to which I refer may be termed _heat-maintaining_ food. I distinguish it thus from food which serves other ends, but of course it is not to be understood that any article of diet serves _solely_ the end of maintaining heat. Accordingly, we find that heat-maintaining substance exists in nearly all the ordinary articles of food. Of these there are two—sugar and fat—which may be looked on as special “heat-givers.” Starch, also, which appears in all vegetables, and thus comes to form a large proportion of our daily food, is a heat-giver. In fact, this substance only enters the system in the form of sugar, the saliva having the power of converting starch (which is insoluble in water) into sugar, and thus rendering it soluble and digestible.

Starch, as I have said, appears in all vegetables. But it is found more freely in some than in others. It constitutes nearly the whole substance of arrowroot, sago, and tapioca, and appears more or less freely in potatoes, rice, wheat, barley, and oats. In the process of vegetation it is converted into sugar; and thus it happens that vegetable diet—whether presenting starch in its natural form to be converted into sugar by the consumer, or containing sugar which has resulted from a process of change undergone by starch—is in general heat-maintaining. Sugar is used as a convenient means of maintaining the heat-supply; for in eating sugar we are saved the trouble of converting starch into sugar. A love for sweet things is the instinctive expression of the necessity for heat-maintaining food. We see this liking strongly developed in children, whose rapid growth is continually drawing upon their heat-supply. So far as adults are concerned, the taste for sweet food is found to prevail more in temperate than in tropical climes, as might be expected; but, contrary to what we might at first expect, we do not find any increase in the liking for sweet food in very cold climates. Another and a more effective way of securing the required heat-supply prevails in such countries.

As starch is converted into sugar, so by a further process sugar is converted into fat. It is by the conversion of sugar into fat that its heat-supplying power is made available. This conversion takes place in the vegetable as well as in the animal system, and thus fat appears in a variety of forms—as butter, suet, oil, and so forth. Now, precisely as sugar is a more convenient heat-supplier than starch, so fat exceeds sugar in its power of maintaining animal heat. It has been calculated that one pound of fat—whether in the form of suet, butter, or oil—will go as far towards the maintenance of animal heat as two pounds of sugar, or as two pounds and a half of starch. Thus it happens that in very cold countries there is developed a taste for such articles of food as contain most fat, or even for pure fat and its analogues—oil, butter, tallow, dripping, and other forms of _grease_.

I have spoken of starch, sugar, and fat as heat-forming articles of food; but I must note their influence in the development of muscles and nerves. Without a certain proportion of fat in the food a wasting of the tissues will always take place; for muscles and nerves cannot form without fat. And conversely, the best remedy for wasting diseases is to be found in the supply of some easily digestible form of fatty food. Well-fatted meat, and especially meat in which the fat is to be seen distributed through the flesh, may be taken under such circumstances. Butter and salad oil are then also proper articles of food. Cream is still better, and cream cheeses may be used with advantage. It is on account of its heat-supplying and fat-forming qualities that cod-liver oil has taken its place as one of the most valuable remedies for scrofulous and consumptive patients.

But it must be noted that the formation of fat is not the object with which heat-supplying food is taken. It is an indication of derangement of the system when heat-giving food is too readily converted into fat. And in so far as this process of conversion takes place beyond what is required for the formation of muscles and nerves, the body suffers in the loss of its just proportion of heat-supply. Of course, if too large an amount of heat-giving food is taken into the system, we may expect that the surplus will be deposited in the form of adipose tissue. The deposition of fat in such a case will be far less injurious to the system than an excessive heat-supply would be. But when only a just amount of heat-giving food is taken, and in place of fulfilling its just office this food is converted into adipose tissue, it becomes necessary to inquire into the cause of the mischief. Technically, the evil may be described as resulting from the deficient oxygenation of the heat-supplying food. This generally arises from defective circulation, and may often be cured by a very moderate but _systematic_ increase in the amount of daily exercise, or by the use of the sponge-bath, or, lastly, by such changes in the dress—and especially in the articles of attire worn next to the skin—as tend to encourage a freer circulation of the blood. The tendency to accumulate fat may sometimes be traced to the use of over-warm coverings at night, and especially to the use of woollen night-clothes. By attending to considerations of this sort, more readily and safely than by an undue diminution of the amount of heat-supplying food, the tendency to obesity may frequently be corrected.

In warm weather we should diminish the supply of heat-giving food. In such weather the system does not require the same daily addition to its animal heat, and the excess is converted into fat. Experiments have shown that despite the increased rate at which perspiration proceeds during the summer months, men uniformly fed throughout the year increase in weight in summer and lose weight in winter.