As we have said, this story of sexual selection takes up a great deal
of space in Darwin's book, and it need only be considered here in so
far as Darwin applied it to the descent of man. To this latter problem
the whole of Part I is devoted, while Part III contains a discussion
of sexual selection in relation to man, and a general summary. Part
II treats of sexual selection in general, and may be disregarded in
our present study. Moreover, many interesting details must necessarily
be passed over in what follows, for want of space.
The first part of the _Descent of Man_ begins with an enumeration of
the proofs of the animal descent of man taken from the structure of
the human body. Darwin chiefly emphasises the fact that the human body
consists of the same organs and of the same tissues as those of the
other mammals; he shows also that man is subject to the same diseases
and tormented by the same parasites as the apes. He further dwells on
the general agreement exhibited by young embryonic forms, and he
illustrates this by two figures placed one above the other, one
representing a human embryo, after Ecker, the other a dog embryo,
after Bischoff.[89]
Darwin finds further proofs of the animal origin of man in the reduced
structures, in themselves extremely variable, which are either
absolutely useless to their possessors, or of so little use that they
could never have developed under existing conditions. Of such vestiges
he enumerates: the defective development of the _panniculus carnosus_
(muscle of the skin) so widely distributed among mammals, the
ear-muscles, the occasional persistence of the animal ear-point in
man, the rudimentary nictitating membrane (_plica semilunaris_) in the
human eye, the slight development of the organ of smell, the general
hairiness of the human body, the frequently defective development or
entire absence of the third molar (the wisdom tooth), the vermiform
appendix, the occasional reappearance of a bony canal (_foramen
supracondyloideum_) at the lower end of the humerus, the rudimentary
tail of man (the so-called taillessness), and so on. Of these
rudimentary structures the occasional occurrence of the animal
ear-point in man is most fully discussed. Darwin's attention was
called to this interesting structure by the sculptor Woolner. He
figures such a case observed in man, and also the head of an alleged
orang-foetus, the photograph of which he received from Nitsche.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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