290 THE HISTORY OF CREATION. 



by one vertebra longer than in man. There still exist 

 rudimentary muscles in the human tail which formerly 

 moved it. 



Another case of human rudimentary organs, only belong- 

 ing to the male, and which obtains in like manner in all male 

 mammals, is furnished by the mammary glands on the 

 breast, which, as a rule, are active only in the female sex. 

 However, cases of different mammals are known, especially 

 of men, sheep, and goats, in which the mammary glands 

 were fully developed in the male sex, and yielded milk as 

 food for their offspring. I have already mentioned before 

 (p. 12) that the rudimentary auricular muscles in man can 

 still be employed to move their ears, by some persons who 

 have perseveringly practised them. In fact, rudimentary 

 organs are frequently very differently developed in different 

 individuals of the same species ; in some they are tolerably 

 large, in others very small. This circumstance is very im- 

 portant for their explanation, as is also the other circum- 

 stance that generally in embryos, or in a very early period 

 of life, they are much larger and stronger in proportion to 

 the rest of the body than they are in fully developed and 

 fully grown organisms. This can, in particular, be easily 

 pointed out in the rudimentary sexual organs of plants 

 (stamens and pistil), which I have already mentioned. They 

 are proportionately much larger in the young flower-bud 

 than in the mature flower. 



I have remarked (p. 15) that rudimentary or suppressed 

 organs were the strongest supports of the monistic or 

 mechanical conception of the universe. If its opponents, the 

 dualists and teleologists, understood the immense signifi- 

 cance of rudimentary organs, it would put them into a state 



