126 ANIMAL LIFE AND HUMAN PROGRESS 



that the human foot differs but little from the foot of the 

 gorilla, and that such trivial differences as there are were 

 acquired, as one might say, the day before yesterday. If 

 any reliance at all is to be placed upon the order of ontogeny 

 as an interpretation of phylogeny, then the very peculiar 

 type of foot which is distinctive of Man has been a very 

 early acquirement. We have already noted the very early 

 differentiation of the peroneus tertius muscle, a muscle which 

 is definitely associated with the human method of standing 

 upright on the feet, and which is found in Man alone among 

 the mammals. The early appearance of this muscle we may 

 correlate with the early differentiation of the human type of 

 foot. From a consideration of these facts we may logically 

 argue that the habit of standing upright upon this foot is a 

 very old, and not a very recent, habit. 



We have therefore arrived, with the setting forth of only 

 a very small portion of the material at hand, at certain definite 

 conclusions. The first is that Homo is not descended from 

 anthropoid apes preceded by a series of Primate forms repre- 

 sented by Old World monkeys, New World monkeys and 

 lemurs. For we have seen that the anatomical characters 

 of Man demand rather a recognition of the finding that his 

 stock branched off from the very root of the Primates ; that 

 Tarsius is to be regarded as a specialised survival of the basal 

 stock of the (non-lemurine) Primates ; that Man has evolved 

 entirely by generalised development of the brain, and that he 

 retains the bodily simplicity only found in some such far- 

 distant progenitor as the Tarsius stock ; that, no matter what 

 may be the relation of the New World and Old World 

 monkeys, the human race combines, in some instances, a 

 blend of their characters ; that the anthropoid apes retain 

 a certain, and a varying, amount of the basal simplicity 

 that belongs to Man, but that the Old World monkeys 

 have specialised far away from this simplicity. Regarded 

 in this way we may say that the line of Homo springs 

 from the base of the (non-lemurine) Primate stem and 

 not from its systematic apex. And this conclusion, which is 

 supported by a host of facts and contradicted by none, is 



