The human foot and the human handHumphry, George Murray, Sir
Science
The human foot and the human hand
Humphry, George Murray, Sir
Foot; Hand
In the great ape called the GORILLA, which is found in the
south-western part of Africa, and of which many specimens have now been
sent to this Country, the _hind-hand_ is of great size and strength, as
may be seen in the accompanying drawing made from a stuffed specimen
in the British Museum. The lower part of the leg is also very thick,
owing to the size of the muscles which move the great toe and the other
digits, and which enable them to give a most powerful grasp. So strong
and savage is the creature that all efforts to capture one alive, when
full-grown, have, hitherto, failed. He is said to give evidence of his
strength of hand and of his amiable propensities in the following way.
He swings by his fore-hands from the trees, and, letting himself down
quietly by them, watches an opportunity of seizing by the neck, with
his huge hind-hand, some unwary Negro who may be passing by, draws him
up, and holds him with vice-like grasp, till his struggles have ceased,
and then drops him a strangled corpse to the ground.
Most of the characters above mentioned as distinctive of the human
foot--such as its compactness and strength, the height of the plantar
arch, the shortness of the toes--are, like the size of the calf, most
marked in the higher members of the human family, in those, that is to
say, who are gifted with the highest intelligence. Thus the formation
of the foot is found to have a correspondence with the formation of
the head, and may, like it, be, to a certain extent, taken, as I
have before remarked, to be an index of intellectual, as well as of
physical, capacity. The relation between the intellectual power and
the physical conformation of man, which is here exemplified, and which
is maintained throughout the frame, is a subject of extreme interest,
and is one which has not attracted the attention of anatomists and
ethnologists so much as it deserves.
To what secondary causes this harmonious adaptation of body to mind
may be due, we cannot clearly tell; but we can see in it a provision
for giving physical ascendancy to superior intellect. And it is most
gratifying to be able to derive, as we may do, from this as well as
from the observation of the past and the present, the assurance that
the cultivation of the mind, provided its moral tone be preserved and
proper sanitary precautions be taken, is not likely to be attended with
any deterioration of the body. On the contrary, we have good reason to
believe that the present civilized nations of the earth, with their
higher mental culture, are inferior to none of their predecessors
in the qualities of the body; surely soldiers never maintained a
hand-to-hand struggle better than the victors at Inkermann; and we
know that the civilized nations are physically superior to most of the
uncivilized. We have good ground, therefore, to hope that the extension
of education and commerce will be productive, on the whole, of an
improvement of the physical condition of the species.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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