lemurs of his day. It requires little imagination to see how the
lengthening thickening hairs on this limb-segment became changed in
their direction by friction against the opposing surfaces of the
thighs, by gravitation, and the frequent dripping of rain when they
were held up to grasp a bough. Here then we see at work new forces of
friction, pressure, gravitation and dripping of rain, turning endlessly
and slowly the lemur-fashion into the ape-fashion, with unlimited time
for their effectual action. In this stock of Man’s ancestry Selection
was taking care of the individual and Habit of the details of his
making--two truly harmonious partners.
From Ape to Man.
Another step, and a long one, has still to be taken from the
ape-fashion to that of man. Bearing in mind that the lemur-fashion has
been totally reversed by the ape it startles one to find that man in
his modern fashion has largely reverted to that of the lemur on the
front and sides of his forearm. This is clearly shown in Figure 1.
There also you see graphically recorded in the hair of the extensor
border of the ulna, a little _backward_ streak, a poor little legacy of
fifty pounds from the fortunes of many thousands once possessed by the
ape. From the present limited point of view, man is a veritable pauper,
and his possessions in this limb-segment may with some irony well be
called a “vestige.”
Professor Scott-Elliott in his book, _Prehistoric Man and His Story_,
p. 60, goes rather wide of the mark here in his graphic picture of our
rude ancestor and his hard life. He gives too strongly the idea of
him sitting asleep in raging gales, in driving rain which is neatly
conducted by the thatch of his hair off his skin. As far as it goes
this need not be questioned, as a matter of probability, but he states
far too broadly “The hair on the arm, even of those civilised men who
retain sufficient to trace the arrangement, turns down both upper
and forearm to the elbow”[46]--true as to the upper arm, but only
true of the forearm in a very narrow streak of hair over the extensor
surface of the ulna. The fact is that in every human being, not too
old, its course can be traced with a lens. He overlooks also from
this protective point of view the fact that the ape or early man, in
the position of rest he describes, would have very much the reverse
of protection from the “lie” of the hair on his thighs, for this is
towards the knee and is well calculated to catch the rain and conduct
it carefully, or let it run, into his groins. So the protection theory
(under the empire of Selection) is again in straits. But I must not
forget my self-denying ordinance alluded to in the Preface, but will
show how the ape fashion began to be modified into its present and
probably final form in man. Still further changes in the simple habits
of the earliest men became frequent, and fresh forces were organised in
our mimic battlefield. Gravitation gradually ceased to act as the hairs
became thinner and shorter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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