44 DR DAVID HEPBURN ON 
with human legs and feet, and surrounded by an environ- 
ment which rendered climbing a necessity. What chance 
of survival would he have without the intelligence requisite 
for the manufacture of weapons wherewith to supersede 
the lost art of climbing swiftly either to reach his food or 
to escape from imminent danger? It has been argued that 
the first incentive to the acquisition of the erect attitude 
would be the need of free hands in the desire for and the 
manufacture of simple weapons. But the recognition of 
the utility of weapons necessitates an increase of intelligence, 
and presumably, therefore, a larger brain as the starting- 
point of the evolution. From this stand-point an increase 
of intelligence would enable its possessor to adapt himself 
to his surroundings with greater ease, to combat those 
adverse conditions of existence under which less favoured 
individuals succumbed ; in other words, to survive in the 
grin struggle and thereby to start his offspring at a more 
favourable level for the upward progress. The mere 
persistence of an ape-like body would not be a disastrous 
inheritance for an animal of increasing intelligence. A man 
would not be fatally handicapped by the possession of an 
ape-like pair of feet, while an ape could scarcely be the 
gainer by the substitution for his own splendid foot-hand 
of a pair of human feet, however perfect. Just as in the 
human infant an increase of brain-power precedes the 
acquisition of the erect attitude, so, it seems to me, an 
increase of intelligence must have preceded any upward 
development of lower forms in the direction of that 
“paragon of animals” which we call man. At the same 
time there is nothing incongruous in the theory that the 
erect attitude characteristic of man may have been evolved 
in association with a cranial capacity materially less than 
the lowest which has been recorded for any individual of 
the genus Homo. Of course, I do not mean to imply that 
the process of evolution advanced more rapidly in the case 
of the head than in that of the feet, any more than I 
believe that it is possible for an animal to develop human 
feet while retaining an ape’s brain. In other words, any 
animal whose individual bones indicated the possession of 
the erect attitude would have a skull and a brain sufficiently 
