Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of ScienceAllen, Grant
Science
Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science
Allen, Grant
Science
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 present day with three-toed
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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