The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4): A Plain Story Simply ToldThomson, J. Arthur (John Arthur)
Science
The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4): A Plain Story Simply Told
Thomson, J. Arthur (John Arthur)
Science
In his individual development, man does in some measure climb up his own
genealogical tree. Stages in the development of the body during its nine
months of ante-natal life are closely similar to stages in the
development of the anthropoid embryo. Babies born in times of famine or
siege are sometimes, as it were, imperfectly finished, and sometimes
have what may be described as monkeyish features and ways. A visit to an
institution for the care of children who show arrested, defective, or
disturbed development leaves one sadly impressed with the risk of
slipping down the rungs of the steep ladder of evolution; and even in
adults the occurrence of serious nervous disturbance, such as
"shell-shock," is sometimes marked by relapses to animal ways. It is a
familiar fact that a normal baby reveals the past in its surprising
power of grip, and the careful experiments of Dr. Louis Robinson showed
that an infant three weeks old could support its own weight for over two
minutes, holding on to a horizontal bar. "In many cases no sign of
distress is evinced and no cry uttered, until the grasp begins to give
way." This persistent grasp probably points back to the time when the
baby had to cling to its arboreal mother. The human tail is represented
in the adult by a fusion of four or five vertebrae forming the "coccyx"
at the end of the backbone, and is normally concealed beneath the
flesh, but in the embryo the tail projects freely and is movable. Up to
the sixth month of the ante-natal sleep the body is covered, all but the
palms and soles, with longish hair (the lanugo), which usually
disappears before birth. This is a stage in the normal development,
which is reasonably interpreted as a recapitulation of a stage in the
racial evolution. We draw this inference when we find that the unborn
offspring of an almost hairless whale has an abundant representation of
hairs; we must draw a similar inference in the case of man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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