If an adventurous gorilla and his mate, whom we may call gorilla Columbi, had long ago made a bid for a life completely terrestrial rather than partly arboreal, it is difficult to imagine how the feet of this pair could have failed to adjust themselves and their separate tarsal elements to a better if rudimentary form like that of man, and that their progeny would not have followed or improved upon this. Professor Keith,[70] in his work referred to, and Professor Wood Jones in _Arboreal Man_, have much to say on the evolution of man’s foot and arch, and I mention this _ab initio_ so as to be free from any supposed claim to originality which is apt in the present extended range of scientific progress to be as damaging to a man as for him to proclaim his honesty or a woman her virtue. And I also formally grant to the Mendelians and Mutationists, without offence and with some possible relief to their minds, a period of leave from this poor trench-warfare--_Plasto-ditēthēsis_ will not be obliged to call in at the place of its hyphen any reinforcements from these of the higher command. [70] _Human Embryology and Morphology._ The assumed precursor of our human walker was probably more highly evolved in his own special line than the real ancestor, but we have so little yet of discoveries of whole skeletons of earliest man that the bodily structure of gorilla C. may fairly be taken as a starting point, indeed he is for this purpose a valuable lay-figure, almost artistic for once, on which may be draped the following story of the making of an arch. The ultimate verdict, which word I use in the old English sense of a “true saying” rather than the most recent declaration of those who “ride on white asses and sit in judgment,” does not therefore invalidate the verisimilitude of this picture. One may go farther and affirm that, given certain anatomical and physiological facts in an earlier Primate stock, which marvellously resemble those of modern man, and it must follow as the night the day that his more primitive physical basis employed in a new mode of progression, that is of terrestrial walking on two feet, will be converted by use and habit into the construction of such new formations as will best agree with the new style--in other words, in this instance, a plantar arch. An Unique Phenomenon. That a plantar arch is peculiar to man is a matter of fact, and Lydekker in the _Royal Natural History_, Vol. I., p. 41, says of the gorilla’s foot incidentally “there is no sort of resemblance to the human instep in the whole foot,” and Professor Keith in the work referred to “the arch is a human character.” One may see this for oneself in living apes and monkeys and in the wonderful series of drawings of apes in all kinds of postures in the _Royal Natural History_, and indeed in the feet of dead apes and monkeys. All Primates other than man walk on a flat sole. Equipment.