16 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP 



pairs extending from the fore to the hind limbs, 

 as in the carnivora and swine. In man and all 

 other primates (except lemurs) the mammary 

 glands are pectoral and two in number. All 

 primates, including man, have also a disc-shaped 

 placenta. The placenta is the organ of nutrition 

 in mammalian embryos. It is found in all young- 

 bearing animals above the marsupials, and con- 

 sists of a mass of glands between the embryo and 

 the parental body. In some animals it entirely 

 surrounds and encloses the embryo ; in others it 

 assumes the form of a girdle ; and in still others 

 it is bell-shaped. The primates are the only 

 animals in which this peculiar organ is in the 

 shape of a simple disc.* 



The nearest relatives by blood man has in this 

 world are the exceedingly man-like apes the 

 tailless anthropoids the gorillas and chimpanzees 

 of Africa, and the orangs and gibbons of southern 

 and insular Asia. The fact that man is an actual 

 relative and descendant of the ape is one of the 

 most disagreeable of the many distasteful truths 

 which the human mind in its evolution has come 

 upon. To a vanity puffed, as is that of human 

 beings, to the splitting, the consanguinity of gorilla 

 and gentleman seems horrible. Man prefers 

 to have arrived on the earth by way of a ladder 

 let down by his imagination from the celestial 

 concave. Within his own memory man has been 



* The bat and a few other animals have a disc-like 

 placenta, but it develops into the disc shape by a different 

 route from what it does in the primates. 



