THE LAST STEPS IN THE GENEALOGY OF MAN. 689 



marked as an organ of prehension and tbe hind limb as an organ of 

 travel. In the first the hnnierns articulates within a narrow glenoid 

 fossa at the upi)er external angle of the scapula in such a manner as to 

 permit the most extensive movements in divers ways, the radius is 

 movable over the ulna, around which it accom})lishes the turning move- 

 ment made necessary by the function of the hand ; the five fingers are 

 free, the thumb is more turned on its axis to admit of opposition ; the 

 hand is continued on a straight line with the fore-arm. In the leg the 

 femur, as with us, is united to a massive pelvis ; the articular surfaces 

 of tlie knee, the knee cai), the two immovable bones of the leg are 

 entirely such as arise from the function of locomotion exclusively; tbe 

 foot is plantigrade, with salient heel, with digits close together, and it is 

 articulated perpendicularly by its arch to the leg, as in man. In another 

 contemporaneous animal and of the same deposit, the coryphodon, (of 

 which I can only judge by the foot and hand figured, but entire,) these 

 two organs show more resemblance, the foot looks a little like a hand, 

 but there is nevertheless adifierentiation. But in man that specializa- 

 tion or difierentiation has attained its maximum ; no other animal is 

 found in the same rank. Among the birds the upper limb has become 

 a wing, a function of locomotion. In man alone the upper limb is 

 exclusively a hand, the lower limb combines in itself all the locomotive 

 function that it divided formerly within certain limits with the anterior, 

 but which nevertheless always retained its essential attribute. It 

 seems tiien that man should be the direct continuation of the first 

 Eocene mammals, if not of the marsupials which preceded them, the 

 completion of a type begun, and it seems scarcely logical that his trans- 

 formation should be accomplished at the expense of a branch that 

 seems collateral. The monkeys are produced by the fact of the adapt- 

 ation of the lower limb to an arboreal life; the upper limb remained 

 as it was ; it is a deviation of the axis of evolution, in some way, a devi- 

 ation from the primitive type. On the one hand the ungulates are 

 detached from the primitive type by a metamorphosis of the anterior 

 limb designed for prehension, into a limb designed for running, and by 

 a harmonious perfection of the four limbs in the same way; on the 

 other the carnivores, whose four extremities, also the teeth, the jaw, 

 and the entire skull put themselves into harmony w ith the needs to 

 which they are subject and the mode of life and diet adopted ; also the 

 monkeys, who avoid the earth usurped partly by the swift herbivores, 

 partly by the sanguinary carnivores, are refugees iu the trees, vyhere 

 nevertheless they have prospered ; they are supported there ,'^nd con- 

 sequently they have appropriated their extremities to that special life. 

 Man being born from the monkeys by the disappearan(;e of the acci- 

 dental adaptation of the hinder limb to the function normally belongingf 

 to the fore limb, that is to say, returning to their primitive archi- 

 ancestral type, such a thing would appear strange ! Assuredly such 'c\ 

 thing nniy be; ^QX nature, as I have said, does not take the shortest 

 pad. From the carnivora, wl^ipU are t^Jrrestrial animals, have (^es(ie^^e^ 

 H. Mis. 324 44 



