186 



The Journal of Heredity 



Long ago, Professor Huxley said that 

 "a man born dumb, notwithstanding 

 his great cerebral mass and his inheri- 

 tance of strong intellectual instincts, 

 would be capable of few higher intel- 

 lectual manifestations than an Orang 

 or a Chimpanzee, if he were confined to 

 the society of a few dumb associates. 

 And yet there might not be the slightest 

 discernible difference between his brain 

 and that of a highly intelligent and cul- 

 tivated person. The dumbness might 

 be the result of a defective structure of 

 the mouth, or of the tongue, or a mere 

 defective innervation of these parts; or 

 it might result from congenital deafness, 

 caused by some minute defect of the 

 internal ear, which only a careful 

 anatomist could discover. 



"The argimient, that because there is 

 an immense difference between a man's 

 intelligence and an ape's, therefore there 

 must be an equally immense difference 

 between their brains, appears to me 

 to be as well based as the reasoning 

 by which one should endeavor to prove 

 that, because there is a 'great gulf 

 between a watch that keeps accurate 



ATELES' FIJTIl HAND 



Some monkeys are afforded practically an 

 additional hand by a prehensile tail such as 

 this. Although it is not used for tactile 

 examination of objects, for purposes of 

 locomotion it serves as well as any other 

 member. However, it is proliable that 

 such an equipment is jf^enetically inferior 

 to the two hands and two feet supi)lied 

 man. (FiK'- 15.) 



time and another that will not go at all, 

 there is therefore a great structural 

 hiatus between the two watches. A 

 hair in the balance-wheel, a little rust 

 on a pinion, a bend in a tooth of the 

 escapement, a something so slight that 

 only the practiced eye of the watch- 

 maker can discover it, may be the 

 source of all the difference." 



Through the kindness of Mr. Edward 

 S. Schmid, of Washington, D. C, who 

 presented me with the material, I am 

 enabled to offer, as illustrations to the 

 present article, various reproductions of 

 photograjjhs which I have made of two 

 species of monkeys, and which aim to 

 show facial expressions as well as the 

 morphology of hands, feet, and tail. In 

 Fig. 1 1 we have the portrait of the com- 

 mon Macaque monkey of India (Macacus 

 rhesus) , a form which stands between the 

 African mangabeys and the baboons. 

 Special attention is invited to the form 

 of its ear and its general phx'siognomy. 

 Note that the ear is pointed posteriorly. 

 In the human species we sometimes meet 

 with cases where this point is present 

 and turned down. Darwin gives an 

 excellent account of this structure in his 

 work on "The Descent of Man" (pp.' 

 15-17), and I have personally seen some 

 excellent examples of it, the best one 

 being in the case of a very low, black 

 negro in New Orleans. This point is 

 not present in the ears of all apes and 

 monkeys, among others it is absent in 

 the large, black spider monkey (Ateles 

 paniscus), here shown in Figs. 12 and 13. 

 In the foetal Orang it is directed upward. 



In i^assing I may say that the black 

 spider monkey belongs in a group 

 wherein the tail is prehensile, and to a 

 large extent fulfills the function of a 

 fifth hand. Its form is well shown in 

 Fig. 15, and this structure, as well as the 

 hand and foot ])ortrayed in Fig. 14, all 

 Ix'longed to the black spider monkey 

 mentioned above (Figs. 12 and 13). This 

 species gets its name, Ateles, from the 

 fact that it possesses no thiunb, that 

 digit of the hand having, in time, 

 entirely aborted. (Right hand cut of 

 Fig. l-i.) The lines of the ])almar sur- 

 faces of the hands and feet in monkeys 

 is an interesting field for comjmrative 

 study, but up to the present time but 

 little has been published on the subject. 



