The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

BOOK 3

an unborn chimpanzee compared with an unborn human being, but the difference is less ; the ape foetus is more human, the human foetus more simian in its proportions. During most of the later half of its prenatal

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Fig. 153. The skeleton of a full-grown male Gorilla.

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CHAPTER 5

soon acquires its thick permanent garment. The skull-shape of a chimpanzee is much more human before birth; and even the characteristic ape-foot is in the foetus much less like a hand and much more human than later, while even after birth the human baby’s foot, with its inturned sole and eagerly prehensile toes, is charged with hints of a racial past spent in the trees.

In fine, man’s structure and development reveal him as zoologically close kin to chimpanzee, g0rilla, and orangoutang. Through the invention of language he is made free of a new mental country, to which they have no access ; but he does not for that reason cease to be their close cousin, any more than a mentally defective child ceases to be the son of his father, any more than Shakespeare ceased to stand in normal bloodrelationship with his cousins, because he entered realms of thought and expression of which they never

Compare it with that of a man (Fig. 4). The two correspond bone for bone. dreamed.

life, the human embryo, like the ape’s, is covered all over with a coat of short, downy hair ; so is an ape embryo of corresponding age. Before birth both ape and man shed this short hair and develop long hair on the head while remaining almost hairless on the body. Man _ retains this condition throughout life, while the new-born ape

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$2 Fossil Men

This testimony from structure and development is confirmed by the authentic voice of the past. Unfortunately, neither apes nor men happen to be preserved as fossils save with extreme rarity, so that we have as yet