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The devil of the Christian religion will at once occur to mind; 
but the Satyri of the Roman religion are still more interesting: 
They are represented with bristly hair, pointed ears, and a tail 
among other features; they inhabited woods and were greatly 
feared by travellers. Not at all improbably there was constant 
war between the smooth-skinned, tailless ancestors of Man, 
and their less-changed, hairy cousins, whom they looked upon 
with contempt for their shape, as well as a wholesome fear 
for their wilder ways; and the memory of these wild cousins 
has very probably been handed down and become the foundation 
of such creatures as Satyrs and Devils, though lapse of time 
has altered and added to their characteristics somewhat. 
I have remarked on the ability of an infant with its toes. 
Such ability is lost among our children in less than eighteen 
months, even if the child have never worn boots; but it is im- 
possible to think that this ability was always confined to the 
infantile stage. It is of no possible use to the child; and 
many of the movements are those which would not be performed 
in walking. But these itovements become intelligible by the 
theory of earlier inheritance. Looking at monkeys and their 
manner of using their hind limbs explains the child’s move- 
ments. The power to twist the soles sideways would be 
necessary in tree-climbing; the use of the big toe as a thumb 
and other movements have been often enough explained. 
No doubt as the monkey-ancestors grew older they 
became more and more expert with their feet, just as we 
become more and more expert with our hands; and the ability 
of the adult monkey with its toes has become the ability of the 
human infant to-day.* 
The loss of this ability, and the movements of a child 
before it can walk correspond to the manner in which the pre- 
human, tree-climbing quadrumana gradually lost their cunning 
with their hind-hands, through using these more and more 
as their only means of support. When the infant is first stood 
by its mother on her lap, it always stands on the outer edges 
* An infant monkey, it is asserted by many writers, is a helpless animal. 
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