About the first thing a human infant does on coming into the world is to prove its arboreal origin by grasping and spitefully clinging to everything that stimulates its palms. A little peeperless babe an hour old can perform feats of strength with its hands and arms that many men and women cannot equal. It can support the entire weight of its body for several seconds hanging by its hands. Dr. Robinson, an English physician, found as a result of sixty experiments on as many infants, more than half of whom were less than an hour old, that with two exceptions every babe was able to hang to the finger or to a small stick, and sustain the whole weight of the body for at least ten seconds. Twelve of those just born held on for nearly a minute. At the age of two or three weeks, when this power is greatest, several succeeded in sustaining themselves for over a minute and a half, two for over two minutes, and one for two minutes and thirty-five seconds. The young ape for some weeks after birth clings tenaciously to its mother’s neck and hair, and the instinct of the child to cling to objects is probably a survival of the instinct of the young ape. I believe it is Wallace who relates somewhere an incident which illustrates the instinct of the young simian to cling to something. Wallace had captured a young ape, and was carrying it to camp, when the little fellow happened to get its hands on the naturalist’s whiskers, which it mistook, evidently, for the hirsute property of its mother, and, driven by the powerful instinct of self-preservation, it hung on to them so desperately it could scarcely be pulled loose. Many mammals are provided with a well-developed muscular apparatus for the manipulation of their ears. But in man there does not exist the same necessity for auricular detection of enemies, and while these muscles still exist, and are capable of being used to a slight extent by occasional individuals, they are generally so emaciated as to be useless. Another vestigial organ in the body of man, and one of significance from the standpoint of morphology, is the tail. The tail is an exceedingly unpopular part of the human anatomy, most men and women being unwilling to admit that they have such an appendage. But many a person who has hitherto dozed in ignorance on this matter has learned with considerable dismay, when he has for the first time looked upon the undraped lineaments of the human skeleton, that man actually has a tail. It consists of three or four (sometimes five) small vertebrae, more or less fused, at the posterior end of the spinal column. That this is really a rudimentary tail is proved beyond a doubt by the fact that in the embryo it is highly developed, being longer than the limbs, and is provided with a regular muscular apparatus for wagging it. These caudal muscles are generally represented in grown-up people by bands of fibrous tissue, but cases are known where the actual muscles have persisted through life.[4]