194 THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE. 



body, and as the act becomes a habit, subsidiary 

 changes slowly take place in other parts. In time the 

 erect position becomes confirmed. Man owes what 

 Burns calls his " heaven-erected face " to the Struggle 

 for Life. How recent this change is, how new the 

 attitude still is to him, is seen from the simple fact 

 that even yet he has not attained the power of retain- 

 ing the erect position long. Most men sit down when 

 they can, and so unnatural is the standing position, so 

 unstable the equilibrium, that when slightly sick or 

 faint, Man cannot stand at all. 



Possibly both the erect position and the Club had 

 another origin, but the detail is immaterial. This 

 " hairy-tailed quadruped, arboreal in its habits," must 

 sometimes have wandered or been driven into places 

 where trees were few and far between. It is conceiv- 

 able that an animal, accustomed to get along mainly 

 by grasping something, should have picked up a 

 branch and held it in its hand, partly to use as a 

 crutch, partly as a weapon, and partly to raise itself 

 from the ground in order to keep a better look-out 

 in crossing treeless spaces. An Orang-outang may 

 now be seen in the Zoological gardens in Java, 

 which promenades about its bower continually with 

 the help of a stick, and seems to prefer the erect 

 position so long as the stick or any support is at 

 hand. 



The next stage after the invention of anything is to 

 improve upon it, or to make a further use of it. Both 

 these things now happened. One day the stick, 

 wrenched rapidly from the tree, happened to be left 

 with a jagged end. The properties of the point were 

 discovered. Now there were two classes of weapons 



