Other reminiscences of this earlier phase are found in the many
vestigial muscles which are found in the body to-day. The head of the
quadruped hangs forward, and is held by powerful muscles and ligaments
in the neck. We still have the shrunken remainder of this arrangement.
Other vestigial muscles are found in the forehead, the scalp, the
nose--many people can twitch the nostrils and the scalp--and under the
skin in many parts of the body. These are enfeebled remnants of the
muscular coat by which the quadruped twitches its skin, and drives
insects away. A less obvious feature is found by the anatomist in
certain blood-vessels of the trunk. As the blood flows vertically in a
biped and horizontally in a quadruped, the arrangement of the valves in
the blood-vessels should be different in the two cases; but it is the
same in us as in the quadruped. Another trace of the quadruped ancestor
is found in the baby. It walks "on all fours" so long, not merely from
weakness of the limbs, but because it has the spine of a quadruped.
A much more interesting fact, but one less easy to interpret, is that
the human male has, like the male ape, organs for suckling the young.
That there are real milk-glands, usually vestigial, underneath the teats
in the breast of the boy or the man is proved by the many known cases in
which men have suckled the young. Several friends of the present writer
have seen this done in India and Ceylon by male "wet-nurses." As there
is no tribe of men or species of ape in which the male suckles the young
normally, we seem to be thrown back once more upon an earlier ancestor.
The difficulty is that we know of no mammal of which both parents
suckle the young, and some authorities think that the breasts have been
transferred to the male by a kind of embryonic muddle. That is difficult
to believe, as no other feature has ever been similarly transferred to
the opposite sex. In any case the male breasts are vestigial organs.
Another peculiarity of the mammary system is that sometimes three, four,
or five pairs of breasts appear in a woman (and several have been known
even in a man). This is, apparently, an occasional reminiscence of an
early mammal ancestor which had large litters of young and several pairs
of breasts.
But there are features of the human body which recall an ancestor even
earlier than the quadruped. The most conspicuous of these is the little
fleshy pad at the inner corner of each eye. It is a common feature in
mammals, and is always useless. When, however, we look lower down in the
animal scale we find that fishes and reptiles (and birds) have a third
eyelid, which is drawn across the eye from this corner. There is little
room to doubt that the little fleshy vestige in the mammal's eye is the
shrunken remainder of the lateral eyelid of a remote fish-ancestor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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