" ARBOREAL MAN" 



227 



select their food with their hands, they even do more than this, for, to 

 a certain extent, they prepare it for eating, with their hands. But this 

 preparation, though an enormous stride, does not go to very great lengths 

 beyond peeling a banana or husking a thin-shelled nut with the fingers ; 

 for anything much more exacting the teeth are requisitioned. We have 

 seen the amount of work that the hands have already saved the teeth 

 in the evolution of an arboreal stock, and there is obviously a tendency 

 in the highest apes for the hands to assume further duties. Man has 

 applied his brain and his mobile hands more fully to this problem, and he 

 has saved his teeth to the utmost limits, but has made a sorry bargain. 



The evolutionary problem, then, was this : how was a cross- 

 feeding species to apply the utmost amount of industry and of 

 co-operation to the treatment (and also to the multiplication 

 and improvement) of the spare products of the higher plant. 



Man (the author continues) has ground, husked, prepared, cleaned, and 

 finally cooked his food. He has -freed it from hard parts, and made it 

 " tender " in every conceivable way. 



Surely this applies in the first place to seeds, fruits and 

 vegetable products generally. By becoming the ally of the 

 respective plants, man has entered the path of great progress. 

 In making his food too " tender," civilised man has overdone 

 the success of his brain. The sorry ".bargain," referred to by 

 the author, consists in the lors of teeth owing to disuse, as he 

 thinks. No doubt modern man sorely needs a more natural 

 dietary. His inferiority with regard to power of repair is accounted 

 for by his flesh-eating propensities, together with other con- 

 comitant evils. It is not so much use or disuse, as abuse that has 

 played havoc with modern man's dentition, and the author fully 

 admits that more primitive races show to advantage when 

 compared to " highly civilised " man. Civilisation per se is no 

 more to be blamed for the decay of the teeth than is the upright 

 position of man to be lauded, as the author says, as one of man's 

 greatest distinctions. 



This praise of human uprightness has, without doubt, been carried 

 to absurd extremes, so also has the tendency to ascribe to this same 

 uprightness a multitude of human weaknesses and disabilities. This 

 visceral uprightness is no new thing, the readjustment has been gradual, 

 and some measure of it has been very long established. It is easy to overdo 

 the praise of the poise. It is equally easy to overdo the condemnation of 

 it as a cause of many ills. 



I should say that it is equally easy to overdo the blame of 

 civilisation in the matter of dental decay, which, no doubt, is 

 more justly viewed as the result of wrong feeding habits. 



