The _slow loris_ shares with many monkeys and apes a very soft moist skin of the palm and sole, and in this and other refinements of this region it is much beyond many more intelligent, active and higher Primates. I have never had social intercourse with a _loris_, but I have shaken the friendly little hand of a _chimpanzee_ with a combination of pleasure, mild shock and perhaps memories of my own palms in the more nervous moments of early life. It is a strange, cool, soft and damp surface, but the sensation conveyed by the skin of a _loris_ lately dead show that in life it is a wonderfully sensitive and tender structure. The whole of the palm and sole is covered with well-developed patterns of papillary ridges especially on the palmar and plantar pads. No trace of old-fashioned nodules, scales or corrugation is to be found. The structures due to stimuli of friction and pressure in its ancestors have disappeared for ever from this specialised and small group, and we may fairly hold, in accordance with the law of conservation of energy, that the past is somehow enwrapped in the present in the strange hands and feet of the _loris_. The adaptations of the hand and foot of the _loris_ are most obviously now of value to it in its wary and dangerous life in the branches of trees, but are equally unfitted for that higher life which, in his case, consists in going lower down, on the ground. The extraordinary deliberate life of the _loris_ has been often described. As he moves from place to place on a branch, fixing one limb before he moves another, much as we do in going up a ladder, he is subjected much to the stimuli of pressure, but hardly at all to those of friction. He sets us a good example of leaving nothing to chance. Thus his soft sensitive skin suits well his mode of progression, but he would find the harder, rougher skin of an African baboon very inferior for the purpose. Here, indeed, I have ventured on the edge of Tom Tiddler’s ground, and the Pan-Selectionist or Mendelian will make a grab at me so that I escape with just the loss of a portion of clothing. After escaping I have only to observe to him as to the adaptations of a _loris’s_ hand and foot that in human life, of which we know a little, one can in a measure forecast what a man will be like if we are told on reliable authority what he and his ancestors have _not_ done in the way of muscular or cerebral output, without information as to what he has done. This is too obvious, but also too complex to prove here by numerous illustrations and it may be left as a mere suggestion as to the past life of the _loris_ and his ancestors for many generations. He has _not_ walked in the ordinary method of terrestrial mammals, he has always moved very slowly about the branches of trees, he sleeps most of the day in a hollow of a tree, curled up like a ball, and his home is in moist, tropical regions. No habits and conditions of life could