06 THE SCAFFOLDING LEFT JN THE BODY. 



forms of life. It is found that conditions which are 

 pathological in one animal are natural in others of a 

 lower species. When any eccentricity appears in a 

 human body the anatomist no longer sets it down as 

 a freak of Nature. He proceeds to match it lower 

 down. Mr. Darwin mentions a case of a man who, 

 in his foot alone, had no less than seven abnormal 

 muscles. Each of these was found among the muscles 

 of lower animals. Take, again, a common case of mal- 

 formation — club-foot. All children before birth dis- 

 play the most ordinary form of this deformity — that, 

 namely, where the sole is turned inwards and upwards 

 and the foot is raised — and it is only gradually that 

 the foot attains the normal adult position. The ab- 

 normal position, abnormal that is in adult Man, is the 

 normal condition of things in the case of the gorilla. 

 Club-foot, hence, is simply gorilla-foot — a case of the 

 arrested development of a character which apparently 

 came along the line of the direct Simian stock. So 

 simple is this method of interpreting the present by 

 the past, and so fruitful, that the anatomist has been 

 able in many instances to assume the role of prophet. 

 Adult man possesses no more than twelve pair of ribs ; 

 the prediction was hazarded by an older Comparative 

 Anatomy that in the embryonic state he would be 

 found with thirteen or fourteen. This prophecy has 

 since been verified. It was also predicted that at this 

 early stage he would be found to possess the insignifi- 

 cant remnant of a very small bone in the wrist, the 

 so-called os centrale, which must have existed in the 

 adult condition of his extremely remote ancestors. 

 This prediction has aiso been fulfilled, as Weismann 

 aptly remarks, " just as the planet Neptune was dis- 



