88 



EVOLUTION, GENETICS, AND EUGENICS 



4. Hands. — Dr. Louis Robinson has recently observed that the 

 grasping power of the whole human hand is so surprisingly great at 

 birth, and during the first few weeks of infancy, as to be far in excess 

 of present requirements on the part of a young child. Hence he con- 

 cludes that it refers us to our quadrumanous ancestry — the young of 

 anthropoid apes being endowed with similar powers of grasping, in 

 order to hold on to the hair of the mother when she is using her arms for 

 the purposes of locomotion. This inference appears to me justifiable, 



Fig. 13. — An infant, three weeks old, supporting its own weight for over two 

 minutes. " The attitude of the lower limbs, feet, toes, is strikingly simian. Repro- 

 duced from an instantaneous photograph, kindly given for the purpose by Dr. L. 

 Robinson. {From Romanes.) 



inasmuch as no other explanation can be given of the comparatively 

 inordinate muscular force of an infant's grip. For experiments 

 showed that very young babies are able to support their own weight, 

 by holding on to a horizontal bar, for a period varying from one 

 half to more than two minutes. With his kind permission, I here 

 reproduce one of Dr. Robinson's instantaneous, and hitherto unpub- 

 lished, photographs of a very young infant. This photograph was 

 taken after the above paragraph (3) was written, and I introduce it 

 here because it serves to show incidentally — and perhaps even better 

 than the preceding figure — the points there mentioned with regard 



