Casting Off the Useless Organs 



mentary organs which have been outgrown and which have 

 not as yet, been completely cast off and destroyed. These 

 vestigial organs are not shadowed by the hand of time for 

 they are real, living parts of our own bodies and may be seen 

 with the naked eye without the aid of a microscope. They 

 stand as weathered monuments of the past marking the way 

 which our ancestors have traveled in their ascent. Their 

 existence and former functions can not be denied without 

 destroying the very foundations of reason. They are found 

 alike in the bodies of both man and the other animals. The 

 body of man shelters more than seventy of these vestigial 

 structures and their existence can be explained in no other 

 way except the evolutionary way. 



Evolution measures the work which it has done and is 

 now doing not in terms of days, months or years, but, on 

 the other hand, its work of both creation and destruction is 

 measured in terms of geologic time. It required millions of 

 years for the ancestors of the horse to develop its multiple 

 toes and when its ancestors selected a habitation on the hard 

 grassy plains where the leaf mold of the forests was no 

 longer found and where a single toe was better fitted for its 

 new environment, it began to cast off Its useless toes — first 

 the shortest and then the next shortest. Sufficient time has 

 not elapsed for the complete removal of all of the useless toes 

 and therefore we see the vestiges of the last receding toe 

 in the form of an aborted toe nail far up on the horses' legs. 

 There are cases where some horses and mules have some- 

 what reverted to their ancestral type by developing a vesti- 

 gial hoof near the remaining hoof which in reality is nothing 

 more than a developed toe nail on its remaining toe. This 



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