TO THE LOWER ANIMALS. Ill 



special long flexor muscle. The carpus of the Orang, 

 like that of most lower apes, contains nine bones, while in 

 the Gorilla, as in Man and the Chimpanzee, there are 

 only eight. 



The Orang's foot (Fig. 20) is still more aberrant ; its 

 very long toes and short tarsus, short great toe, short and 

 raised heel, great obliquity of articulation in the leg, and 

 absence of a long flexor tendon to the great toe, separating 

 it far more widely from the foot of the Gorilla than the 

 latter is separated from that of Man. 



But, in some of the lower apes, the hand and foot 

 diverge still more from those of the Gorilla, than they do 

 in the Orang. The thumb ceases to be opposable in the 

 American monkeys ; is reduced to a mere rudiment cov- 

 ered by the skin in the Spider Monkey ; and is directed 

 forwards and armed with a curved claw like the other 

 digits, in the Marmosets — so that, in all these cases, there 

 can be no doubt but that the hand is more different from 

 that of the Gorilla than the Gorilla's hand is from Man's. 



And as to the foot, the great toe of the Marmoset is 

 still more insignificant in proportion than that of the 

 Orang — while in the Lemurs it is very large, and as com- 

 pletely thumb-like and opposable as in the Gorilla — but 

 in these animals the second toe is often irregularly modi- 

 fied, and in some species the two principal bones of the 

 tarsus, the astragalus and the os calcis, are so immensely 

 elongated as to render the foot, so far, totally unlike that 

 of any other mammal. 



So with regard to the muscles. The short flexor of 

 the toes of the Gorilla differs from that of Man by the cir- 

 cumstance that one slip of the muscle is attached, not to 

 the heel bone, but to the tendons of the long flexors. The 

 lower Apes depart from the Gorilla by an exaggeration 

 of the same character, two, three, or more, slips becoming 



