THE DARWINIAN THEORY 37 



little lower than himself and capable of progressive improve- 

 ment. Possibly this was an incipient notion of the theory 

 with which Charles Darwin, a famous naturalist, disturbed 

 the scientific world half a century ago. In a noted book, 

 The Origin of Species, he attempted to explain how all 

 existing species may have descended from one or at least 

 very few low forms of life. Heated controversies were 

 excited which have not yet been laid to rest, resulting in 

 considerable changes in classification in zoology and 

 biology. 



Any discussion of the vexed question of evolution would 

 be out of place in the present work, but one or two 

 interesting points may be noted. It is not claimed, as is 

 often popularly supposed, that man is descended from the 

 monkey. A man would not say that he is descended 

 from his cousins, since both he and his cousins are the 

 descendants of their ancestors. 



When, in teaching it to walk, a child is first held to the 

 ground, only the outer portions of its feet rest upon the 

 surface. The soles are rather opposed to each other ; in 

 fact, the child adopts the bough-grasping attitude. The 

 forehands of many monkeys are merely grasping hooks 

 in which the thumb, or the apology for it, is not called 

 into play. Young children show a habitual disuse of the 

 thumb, and whether employed or not the hand is usually 

 held in a grasping position. It is a remarkable fact that 

 an infant under an hour old will support its own weight 

 by its hands for at least thirty seconds, and a child of 

 three weeks old has supported itself for quite two and a 

 half minutes. 



Civilised beings may not be flattered at the suggestion 

 that they originally sprang from the same stock as the 

 monkey, but there are types of the human family who, in 

 their personal characteristics, apart from their physical 

 structure, are but little removed from the four-handed beast. 

 In any case it is impossible to establish any regular ascend- 

 ing series from the lower monkeys to man, the highest 

 animal type. The Orang appears to come very close to 

 man in that it possesses even a beard, but its chin is less 

 like man than is the Siamang's. The Orang's backbone in 



