CORPOREAL CHARACTERISTICS OF MAN. 429 



While some, perversely desirous of degrading their race, have 

 attempted to remove a splendid distinction by asserting that we are 

 constructed for all fours, others with equal perverseness and igno- 

 rance have asserted that monkeys are destined for the upright pos- 

 ture. The monkey tribe, it is true, maintain the erect posture less 

 awkwardly than other brutes with four extremities, but they can- 

 not maintain it long, and, while in it, they bend their knees and 

 body j they are insecure and tottering, and glad to rest upon a stick ; 

 their feet, too, instead of being spread for support, are coiled up 

 as if to grasp something. In fact their structure proves them 

 to be neither biped nor quadruped, but four-handed, animals. 

 They live naturally in trees, and are furnished with four hands 

 for grasping the branches and gathering their food. Of their 

 four hands the posterior are even the more perfect, and are in 

 no instance destitute of a thumb, although, like the thumbs of 

 all the quadrumana, so insignificant as to have been termed by 

 Eustachius, " omnino ridiculus ; " whereas the anterior hands of 

 one variety (simia paniscus) have not this organ. The whole 

 length of the Orang-outang, it may be mentioned, falls very much 

 short of ours. 



It was anciently supposed that man, because gifted with the 

 highest mental endowments, possessed the largest of all brains.* 

 But as elephants and whales surpass him in this respect, and the 

 sagacious monkey and dog have smaller brains than the com- 

 paratively stupid ass, ox, and hog, the opinion was relinquished 

 by the moderns, and man was said only to have the largest brain 

 in proportion to the size of his body. But as more extensive 

 observation proved canary and other birds, and some varieties of 

 the monkey tribe, to have larger brains than man in proportion 

 to the body 5i and several mammalia to equal him in this par- 

 ticular, and as rats and mice too surpass the dog, the horse, and 

 the elephant, in the comparative bulk of their brains ; this opinion 



* Consult Dr. Spurzheim, 1. c. on the correspondence between the mind and 

 the proportion of the brain in several particulars. 



