Physical Evolution of Man 579 



readily have suggested the weaving or plaiting of palm leaf 

 segments, of grasses, and other leafy or stalked fibrous material 

 into protective covers. 



But noting the warmth of animal skins, that had been taken 

 in the chase, and removed by hand action aided by rude stone 

 knives, these skins in colder regions were gradually adopted 

 and shaped into garments. This device, or the previous one 

 of fashioning in warmer climes fibrous coverings, enabled man 

 to adapt himself successfully to sudden changes of temperature 

 in a manner that other animals were wholly incapable of. 

 Such important results came, we claim, entirely from hand ex- 

 perimentation and stimulus of a cognitic nature, that, gathered 

 up in the brain into more complex cogitic resultants, gave re- 

 sponse in the form of dress. 



A highly important feature, however, should now be con- 

 sidered in man's evolution. Descended from a hair-covered 

 ape, what causes operated to decrease the hair covering to its 

 present sparse extent .-^ One or two environal conditions, 

 either separatedly or at times perhaps cooperating, conspired 

 to this result. Primitive man, like most monkeys and many 

 rude tribes still, was mainly arboreal in habit. A shade or 

 arboreal life, alike amongst higher plants and animals, invari- 

 ably prevents stimulatory formation of hairs, or causes gradual 

 absorption of these if change be slowly made to the environ- 

 ment next noted; sun-exposed and wind-exposed life often 

 causes in higher plants and in the higher or mammalian animals 

 hair formation. So long, therefore, as the urodeles sheltered 

 under stones in shady places or amongst leaves they remained 

 apparently smooth, with only fine tactile skin endings embedded 

 in, or slightly rising as soft processes above, the surface-level. 

 As we would consider that they became, during the later car- 

 boniferous and the permian epochs, animals of the semi-shade 

 and of the open, the tactile endings projected increasingly as 

 hairs, that conserved the animal heat toward niglit, antl dif- 

 fused or distributed it during day. 



As we see in any good collection, over considerable areas of 

 the body in arboreal monkeys, the hair covering often becomes 



