The Whence and the Whither of Man: A Brief History of His Origin and Development through Conformity to Environment; Being the Morse Lectures of 1895Tyler, John M. (John Mason)
Religion
The Whence and the Whither of Man: A Brief History of His Origin and Development through Conformity to Environment; Being the Morse Lectures of 1895
Tyler, John M. (John Mason)
Evolution
But there is another characteristic of the brain which seems to bear
a close relation to the degree of intelligence. The surface of the
human brain is not smooth but covered with convolutions, with
alternating grooves or sulci, which vastly increase its surface and
thus make room for more gray matter. Says Gratiolett: "On comparing
a series of human and simian brains we are immediately struck with
the analogy exhibited in the cerebral forms in all these creatures.
There is a cerebral form peculiar to man and the apes; and so in the
cerebral convolutions, wherever they appear, there is a general
unity of arrangement, a plan, the type of which is common to all
these creatures." Professor Huxley says: "It is most remarkable
that, as soon as all the principal sulci appear, the pattern
according to which they are arranged is identical with the
corresponding sulci in man. The surface of the brain of the monkey
exhibits a sort of skeleton map of man's, and in the man-like apes
the details become more and more filled in, until it is only in
minor characters that the chimpanzee's or orang's brain can be
structurally distinguished from man's."
The facts of anatomy, at least, are all against us. Struggle as we
may, be as snobbish as we will, we cannot shake off these poor
relations of ours. Our adult anatomy at once betrays our ancestry,
if we attempt to deny it. Read the first chapter of that remarkable
book by Professor Drummond on the "Ascent of Man," the chapter on
the ascent of the body, and the second chapter on the scaffolding
left in the body. The tips of our ears and our rudimentary ear
muscles, the hair on hand and arm, and the little plica semilunaris,
or rudimentary third eyelid in the inner angle of our eyes, the
vermiform appendage of the intestine, the coracoid process on our
shoulder-blades, the atlas vertebra of our necks--to say nothing of
the coccyx at the other end of the backbone--many malformations, and
a host of minor characteristics all refute our denial.
If we appeal from adult anatomy to embryology the case becomes all
the worse for us. Our ear is lodged in the gill-slit of a fish, our
jaws are branchial arches, our hyoid bone the rudiment of this
system of bones supporting the gills. Our circulation begins as a
veritable fish circulation; our earliest skeleton is a notochord;
Meckel's cartilage, from which our lower jaw and the bones of our
middle ear develop, is a whole genealogical tree of disagreeable
ancestors. Our glandula thyreoidea has, according to good
authorities, an origin so slimy that it should never be mentioned in
polite society. The origin of our kidneys appears decidedly vermian.
Time fails me to read merely the name of the witnesses which could
be summoned from our own bodies to witness against us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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