90 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



in size of these teeth. Hence the premaxilla enlarged with 

 the growth of these teeth because it held in trust the necessary 

 blood-supply to ensure their growth. On the other hand, in 

 the case of man the bone remained at its original size because 

 man's canines have never been very large. In the chimpanzee 

 the canines are much smaller than those of the gorilla, and 

 the suture, having served its purpose, disappears as this animal 

 becomes adult. 



The apes have not made the same success of their canines 

 as the baboon has done, perhaps because they began to specialise 

 too late in the history of the species. A broken orang tooth 

 has been found in the Pliocene, and many large orangs and 

 gorillas break their teeth. This is not done by fighting, but 

 by honest hard work to obtain their means of subsistence from 

 the nuts and trunks of trees. Man has become lord of all 

 because he never had great canines. The apes are rapidly 

 becoming extinct because they developed theirs too late. 



After the migration of the gorilla it would appear that no 

 other emigrant was able to make good his footing in the forest 

 or on the plains until the evolution of Homo sapius. Some of 

 them tried to do so, and it is probable that many remains 

 corresponding to Pithecanthropus will gradually be found. 

 Such failures are not steps in the evolution of modern man, 

 but races which left the seashore too late to develop specialised 

 organs of attack and defence, and too early to survive through 

 their superior brain-power alone. Eoanthropus and Neandertal 

 man also wandered away from the safety of the shore too 

 early. Such races may have each been struggling against the 

 wild beasts and climatic conditions for an average of a hundred 

 thousand years before they became extinct. It is clear that 

 many modifications of structure may have resulted, and on 

 the whole these modifications would be in the direction of the 

 chimpanzee— the youngest of their cousins which successfully 

 trod the same path. It follows that no stage in the ancestry 

 of man may have been very like either one or other of these 

 extinct races. 



As the essential part of this theory is the evolution of man 

 in safety at the seaside, we shall now give the evidence — negative 

 and positive — in favour of this view. 



Evidence for a Seaside Life 



The negative evidence is the improbability of man's success 

 anywhere else. When the common ancestor left the trees and 

 became a ground ape he had only three types of locality open : 

 the plains amongst the rocks, for there was little grass until 

 the Oligocene ; the scrub or jungle at the foot of the forest 



