Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, May 1885Various
History
Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, May 1885
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals
Was he black? That we don’t certainly know, but all analogy would lead
one to answer positively, Yes. White men seem, on the whole, to be a
very recent and novel improvement on the original evolutionary pattern.
At any rate he was distinctly hairy, like the Ainos, or aborigines
of Japan, in our own day, of whom Miss Isabella Bird has drawn so
startling and sensational a picture. Several of the pre-Glacial
sketches show us lank and gawky savages with the body covered with
long scratches, answering exactly to the scratches which represent
the hanging hair of the mammoth, and suggesting that man then still
retained his old original hairy covering. The few skulls and other
fragments of skeletons now preserved to us also indicate that our
old master and his contemporaries much resembled in shape and build
the Australian black fellows, though their foreheads were lower and
more receding, while their front teeth still projected in huge fangs,
faintly recalling the immense canines of the male gorilla. Quite apart
from any theoretical considerations as to our probable descent (or
ascent) from Mr. Darwin’s hypothetical “hairy arboreal quadrumanous
ancestor,” whose existence may or may not be really true, there can be
no doubt that the actual historical remains set before us pre-Glacial
man as evidently approaching in several important respects the higher
monkeys.
It is interesting to note too that while the Men of the Time still
retained (to be frankly evolutionary) many traces of the old
monkey-like progenitor, the horses which our old master has so cleverly
delineated for us on his scrap of horn similarly retained many traces
of the earlier united horse-and-donkey ancestor. Professor Huxley has
admirably reconstructed for us the pedigree of the horse, beginning
with a little creature from the Eocene beds of New Mexico, with five
toes to each hind foot, and ending with the modern horse, whose
hoof is now practically reduced to a single and solid-nailed toe.
Intermediate stages show us an Upper Eocene animal as big as a fox,
with four toes on his front feet and three behind; a Miocene kind as
big as a sheep, with only three toes on the front foot, the two outer
of which are smaller than the big middle one; and finally a Pliocene
form, as big as a donkey, with one stout middle toe, the real hoof,
flanked by two smaller ones, too short by far to reach the ground. In
our own horse these lateral toes have become reduced to what are known
by veterinaries as splint bones, combined with the canon in a single
solidly morticed piece. But in the pre-Glacial horses the splint bones
still generally remained quite distinct, thus pointing back to the
still earlier period when they existed as two separate and independent
side toes in the ancestral quadruped. In a few cave specimens, however,
the splints are found united with the canons in a single piece, while
conversely horses are sometimes, though very rarely, born at the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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