MAN AND APES. 293 



old belief, has taken the useless trouble of proving that 

 the skull of the orang could not possibly be transformed 

 into the human head. As if the doctrine of Descent had 

 ever asserted such nonsense ! The bony skull of these 

 apes has reached an extreme, comparable to that of our 

 domestic cattle. But this extreme appears only gra- 

 dually in the course of growth, and the calf knows little 

 of it, but possesses, as we have already mentioned, the 

 cranial form of its antelope-like ancestors. In the pre- 

 sent antelopes, and likewise in goats and sheep, this 

 form, transitory in the calf, has remained stable. Now, 

 as the youthful skull of the anthropomorphous apes exhi- 

 bits, with undeniable distinctness, a descent from proge- 

 nitors with a well-formed and still plastic cranium, and a 

 dentition approximating to that of man, the transforma- 

 tion of these parts in conjunction with the brain, the 

 latter by reason of its persistently small volume, has, as 

 it were, struck out a disastrous path, while in the human 

 branch, selection has effected a higher conser\^ation of 

 these cranial characters. 



With this falls also the objection recently raised by the 

 venerable Karl Ernest v. Baer, that it is inconceivable 

 how% from the monkey's feet, arranged for climbing and 

 grasping, the human foot, adapted for flat treading and 

 walking, should be evolved in the struggle for existence. 

 The tendency to oppose the big toe to the others, that is, 

 to a prehensile foot, is known to be a human attribute, and 

 this tendency is certainly inherited. How far the capa- 

 city for climbing may have been developed in the pri- 

 mordial ancestors, is as much unknown as these primordial 

 ancestors themselves. Thus the aptitude in climbing 

 shown by most of the present monkeys is only remotely 



