Page:Evolution of Life (Henry Cadwalader Chapman, 1873).djvu/215

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ANTHROPOLOGY.
163

considered the higher apes to be more nearly allied to man than to the lower monkeys. The untenability of Blum enbach's classification becomes at once evident, on reflecting that no one would argue that the Chinese boatmen and Bengalese artisans are four-handed because they can row and weave with their feet. We would only say these people use their feet as hands. No one regards the hands of the Colopus and Ateles as feet because in these monkeys the thumb is so rudimentary (or absent) that its opposability to the hand is impossible. We see, therefore, that if the mobility of the thumb or big toe be accepted as a test of an extremity being a hand or a foot, we should have to admit the existence of four-handed people, and of monkeys having feet where their hands usually are, and vice versa. Prof. Huxley has, however, shown that there is as much difference anatomically between the foot and hand of the monkeys as between the foot and hand of man. The essential difference of a hand, as compared with a foot, consists in the characteristic arrangement of the bones in the two members, and the presence or absence of certain muscles. Accepting this test as the correct one, monkeys as well as men are two-handed and two-footed. Prof. Huxley has also demonstrated "that the structural differences which separate Man from the Gorilla and the Chimpanzee are not so great as those which separate the Gorilla from the lower Apes." This is at once seen on comparing Figs. 182 to 193, representing the skull, teeth, hand, pelvis, and foot of a Man, of a Gorilla, and of some other monkey. While it is admitted that there are gaps between Man and the Gorilla, between the Gorilla and the Orang, between the Orang and lower monkeys, the differences, however, are not sufficiently great to admit of making distinct orders: hence Man and the Gorilla, etc. must be considered as members of the order of Monkeys.

We concluded our chapter on Zoology by noticing the