144 HOMO V. DARWIN". 



feet." These creatures, therefore, "assume the erect 

 attitude ! " Their feet are " rendered flat, and the great 

 toe peculiarly modified, though this has entailed the loss 

 of the power of prehension." The hands, now used less for 

 such rough work as climbing trees, acquire a human, 

 delicateness of touch. " The pelvis " is " made broader, 

 the spine peculiarly curved, and the head fixed in an altered 

 position. The brain increases in size, and rational intellect 

 is developed. They become "divested of hair for orna- 

 mental purposes," and at length the tail now a rather 

 inconvenient appendage of the brute is somehow got rid 

 of, leaving only a "few basal and tapering segments," 

 which "become completely embedded within the body." 

 Thus, from the ape, by a series of " insensible " gradations, 

 there rises, at length, the man ! Such, at least, expressed in 

 very nearly his own words, is Mr. Darwin's avowed belief. 

 It would be humiliating, though curious, were Mr. 

 J)ar\vin's hypothesis true, to reflect on the strange and 

 merely animal contingencies on which the existence of the 

 human race has depended. If the bo lily structure of some 

 ancient member of the Primates had not been wonderfully 

 plastic ; if he had not wooed and won for himself a mate of 

 like plastic frame ; if their posterity had not inherited 

 their plastic qualities ; if there had not been a change in 

 their manner of procuring subsistence, or in the conditions 

 of their native country ; if they had not thus become some- 

 what less arboreal in their habits; if they had not then 

 begun to change in a bipedal, and not in a quadrupedal 

 direction ; if any one of these contingencies had not 

 occurred, the human raco had never existed ; there would 

 still have been the hairy quadruped, with tail and pointed 

 ears, living on the trees of African forests, but man, "the 

 wonder and glory of the universe,*' had not come forth to 



