124 ANIMAL LIFE AND HUMAN PROGRESS 



animals. Man, as I have elsewhere insisted, 1 came of an 

 arboreal stock, his acquirement of the upright posture was 

 initiated amongst the branches of the trees up which he 

 climbed, and, as such, his uprightness is almost certainly an 

 extremely old human possession. Arboreal uprightness and 

 terrestrial uprightness are very different things, but Man has 

 certainly converted the one into the other. Even terrestrial 

 uprightness is no recent acquirement, as many would have us 

 believe. 



Blumenbach, and later Cuvier, were so impressed by 

 the distinctions of the human foot that they conceived it 

 only just to place its owner in a special order distinct from 

 the monkeys and apes. This order they called Bimana, 

 since with the specialisation of the foot Man became dis- 

 tinguished by the possession of two hands, and Cuvier defined 

 hands as being members with one digit capable of opposition 

 to the other digits. It seems almost incredible that Huxley 

 should have argued that, since the American monkeys cannot 

 oppose their thumbs, they cannot have four hands and so 

 are ineligible for admission to the Quadrumana, but must be 

 classed as Bimana, although their " hands " were situated upon 

 their hind limbs. By such an argument was the order Bimana 

 destroyed when destruction of human distinction was easy 

 and popular. Even an attempt to emphasise the distinction of 

 Man in possessing two feet fared no better. Huxley made 

 short work of this claim. He showed how like the foot of 

 Man was to that of the gorilla in the disposition of its bones, 

 he pointed to the similarity of the muscles (but he failed 

 altogether to note the beautiful difference in arrangement of 

 the interossei muscles). But he was still faced by two facts 

 that had to be argued away : the first that the big toe of the 

 anthropoid apes is opposable, whereas that of Man is not, and 

 the second, the remarkably different digital formula of the 

 foot of Homo and the apes. In this dilemma he sought 

 refuge, as so many have done, in the cramping effects of boot 

 pressure. It is so easy to see in the habit of wearing boots 

 the reason for the loss of the opposability of the human big 



1 Arboreal Man (Edward Arnold, 1916). 



