178 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tion. With man alone the upper limb is exclusively a hand. The 

 hinder limb condenses in itself all the locomotive function which 

 it has till now shared within certain limits with the fore-limb, but 

 which has nevertheless remained directly its essential attribute. 

 Man thus seems to be the direct continuation of the first Eocene 

 mammalia ; if not of the marsupials that preceded them, the con- 

 firmation of a type that had been begun ; and it does not appear 

 very logical that his transformation should have been elffected at 

 the expense of a branch which appears collateral. The monkeys 

 have been produced by an adaptation of the hinder limb to an 

 arboreal life, the fore-limb remaining what it was ; this is a devia- 

 tion in some way from the axis of evolution, a deviation from the 

 primitive type. From this primitive type have been detached on 

 one side the ungulates through a metamorphosis of a fore-limb 

 adapted to prehension into a limb adapted to running, and through 

 a harmonic perfecting of the four limbs for the same purpose ; on 

 another side, the carnivores, whose four limbs have been set, to- 

 gether with the teeth, the jaw, and all the skull, into harmony 

 with the necessities to which they were subjected and the mode 

 of life and regimen they had adopted ; and, on the third side, the 

 monkeys, which, seeing the earth taken possession of by swift- 

 footed herbivores and bloodthirsty carnivores, have taken refuge 

 in the trees, or at least have flourished and maintained themselves 

 there, and have consequently fitted their extremities to that special 

 kind of life. 



For men to be derived from monkeys through the disappear- 

 ance of the accidental adaptation of the hind-limb to a function 

 normally devolving on the fore-limb — that is, by returning toward 

 their primitive arch-ancestral type — seems strange. But it is pos- 

 sible, for nature does not take the shortest roads. From the car- 

 nivores, terrestrial animals, have descended the pinnipeds, which 

 by a reversionary adaptation have had their limbs atrophied, 

 brought near the body in the shape of paddles, and made to per- 

 form the part of fins. But the most probable is generally the 

 most simple. The hook which such an evolution of man or of 

 one of his precursors would have made is useless. It seems more 

 rational to conceive the perfect bipedal and two-handed type as 

 descending from a type which we have already seen marked out 

 in Eocene times, and constituting the fundamental original of the 

 mammalia. We should then have to consider the simian branch 

 as a collateral branch in which the evolution has not gone beyond 

 what is exhibited in the recent and fossil anthropoids. 



This hypothesis would solve some difficulties in anthropology 

 that seem insurmountable. The lowest human races known to 

 us are so near to the higher races in proportion to the distance 

 that separates them from the monkeys, that we can consider the 



