THE ORIGIN OF MAN 107 



be so very disdainful of an orang. Yet these are not 

 half-way back to our ancestors. Some of the central 

 African natives take us still further. Take the ugliest 

 and most stupid of these that you can find, imagine 

 something far more ugly and stupid, and then you 

 have our human ancestor. We have various skulls 

 of him, and we know it. He goes very near the 

 higher ape-family. 



But even we highly civilized and refined folk have 

 in our bodies — some day, perhaps, scholars will say 

 in our characters (wars, cruelties, etc.) also— many 

 traces of our brute ancestry. Why has the male 

 human being got breasts? He has real, though 

 stunted, milk-glands behind those little warts or teats 

 that you see. Why? Evolution alone gives the 

 answer. We come of a very ancient group of animals, 

 in which the male helped to suckle the young. Why 

 have we those shrivelled pieces of cartilage which we 

 call our ears ? They have no functions. They do not 

 help you to hear. Evolution, and evolution alone, 

 answers the question. We come of a remote animal 

 ancestor which had movable, pointed, useful ears like 

 those of the horse. There are about a hundred organs, 

 or parts or traces of organs, in the human body to-day 

 that can be explained only in this way. 



We come of a remote animal ancestor. What was 

 it like, and how and why did it become man ? I have 

 said that it is now customary to explain very carefully 

 that our ancestor was not a monkey or an ape. 1 con- 



