STORY OF THE CHIN—ROBINSON. 601 
peculiar esthetic standards obviously existing a little lower down the 
scale among the baboons, drills, and mandrils. 
A chin is now unquestionably a sine qua non of human beauty. 
But how did it become so? When did the simian ideal cease to flutter 
the hearts of our primitive ancestors ? 
Do we not find that almost all the adorable features which have this 
disturbing and fateful influence nowadays are based upon and are the 
sign of some intrinsic quality contributing to racial efficiency which 
lies behind mere appearance? ‘The lower races are continually, to the 
great embarrassment of sundry colonial governments, desirous of 
mating with a superior race differmg from them in physique and in 
color. There can be no question that if the colonists in such cases 
were not the superior race this evidence of the working of sexual 
selection would not appear. It would seem, therefore, that the primi- 
tive man who was manly and, amongst other manly attributes, had a 
chin, scored all along the evolutionary line in mating contests over 
the primitive man who was apelike. The individual or the race which 
does not recognize the upward stream of tendency in such particulars 
by instinct alone can not be found upon the surface of this planet. 
One argument against the sufficiency of sexual selection in produc- 
ing a chin is the well-known fact that man in the early stages of his 
existence muffled up his lower jaw with a beard, which is almost 
without doubt of purely ornamental value. Hence it would seem that 
the chin per se as a sexual ornament was a failure. Women, it is 
true, have not’ adopted this form of hirsute decoration; but I doubt if 
this goes far in helping the esthetic argument, since, according to the 
ideals generally current, a big jaw and formidaple chin are nowhere 
considered an excellent thing in woman. I think we shall find that 
before esthetics came greatly into play more prosaic evolutionary 
forces had already exerted pressure upon the lower jawbone and had 
begun to mold it into the general shape in which we find it now. 
A glance at the drawing of the mandible of a chimpanzee (see fig. 
62) with the roots of the teeth exposed shows the real status of the 
chin in the anthropoids. It is mainly formed by two thick bony but- 
tresses supporting the sockets of the lower canine teeth. This appar- 
ently was the real physical beginning of the bony chin, or rather was, 
as it were, the gross concrete foundation upon which evolutionary 
forces of another kind have based the modern structure. 
It is a most remarkable and suggestive fact that after man (or the 
inframan) had lost his huge lower canines this abundance of bony 
tissue in the lower edge of the mandible did not disappear, but 
became more marked as an anatomical feature. (See fig. 64.) 
From analogy with the elephant, such a degeneration should have 
taken place at once. That this did not happen is a proof that the 
