68o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



necks and breasts of the mothers, holding on by the long hair of 

 their shoulders and sides. This was the case with a young Rhoe- 

 sus monkey born in the Zoological Gardens. Wallace, in his 

 Malay Archipelago, gives an account of a very young orang 

 which he secured after shooting the mother. He states that the 

 baby orang was in most points as helpless as a human infant, and 

 lay on its back, quite unable to sit upright. It had, however, an 

 ■extraordinary power of grip, and when it had once secured a hold 

 -of his beard he was not able to free himself without help. On his 

 taking it home to his house in Sarawak he found that it was very 

 unhappy unless it could seize and hold on to something, and would 

 lie on its back and sprawl about with its limbs until this could be 

 accomplished. He first gave it some bars of wood to hold on to, 

 but, finding it preferred something hairy, he rolled up a buffalo- 

 skin, and for a while the little creature was content to cling to this, 

 until, by trying to make it perform other maternal duties and 

 fill an empty stomach, the poor orphan mias nearly choked itself 

 with mouthfuls of hair and had to be deprived of its comforter. 

 The whole story of this poor little ape is both amusing and 

 pathetic, as well as instructive, and I can not do better than refer 

 those not already acquainted with it to the book, which is as a 

 whole as good an introduction for the young student to the science 

 of evolution as could well be found. 



This power to hold on to the parent in any emergency may be 

 com_[>ared to the galloping power of the young foal and the instinct 

 of concealment in the calf ; it is the one chief means of self-preser- 

 vation adopted by the young of the arboreal quadrumana. During 

 long epochs, impossible to measure by years, it would constantly 

 be exercised ; and it is plain that every infant ape that failed to 

 exercise it, or which was physically unable from any cause to 

 cling to its mother, when pursued by an agile foe, would either 

 fall to the ground or be devoured among the branches. When 

 we consider the harassed and precarious life of all wild creatures 

 and the number of their enemies, it becomes apparent that scarcely 

 an individual would be exempt from being many times put to the 

 test, and the habit would, by the survival of those only which 

 were able to maintain their grip, become more and more confirmed, 

 until it became an integral part of the nature of all quadrumana 

 and their descendants. 



This being so, it occurred to me to investigate the powers of 

 grip in young infants ; for if no such power were present, or if the 

 grasp of the hands proved only to be equally proportionate to any 

 other exhibition of muscular strength in those feeble folk, it 

 would either indicate that our connection with quadrumana was 

 of the slightest and most remote description, or that man had some 

 other origin than the Darwinian philosophy maintains. 



