Improvements in Man's Body 221 



state of affairs at successive periods. We are sure that 

 dogs are continuing to evolve — for the worse as well 

 as for the better. We are sure that wheats are still 

 evolving; finer and finer races continue to emerge. 

 Similarly in Wild Nature, if we measure a set of char- 

 acters year after year under similar conditions of life, 

 and find an emphatic increase or decrease in certain 

 measurements, we may safely conclude that the 

 species is moving in a certain direction as regards 

 particular characters. The difficulty of doing this 

 for man is that a human generation means a long time 

 and that the habit of taking exact measurements is 

 very young. The anatomist knows well that little 

 variations are always cropping up in man's body, 

 but it is another thing to prove that any of these is 

 taking racial grip. 



It is easy to suggest theoretical improvements in 

 man as an organism. His thirty feet or so of food- 

 canal is probably far too long for the requirements 

 of civilized dietary. The appendix vermif ormis seems 

 a troublesome relic which might be dispensed with. 

 The teeth are often inconveniently crowded, and as a 

 matter of fact the wisdom tooth often fails to cut the 

 gum. The little toe does not seem to be of much 

 account. Now it may be that some of the desirable 

 improvements are going on at present, but so slowly 

 that their advance is hardly to be discerned. There 

 is not, however, much convincing evidence that man 

 is adding in any marked way to his bundle of adapta- 

 tions, as an evolving organism should do. 



Man is an antiquity, the long result of time; he 



