152 INITIATIVE IN EVOLUTION 



walking or running is no more prominent or frequent than is a good 

 " run " on the part of a hunter which pursues the hare with his 

 beagles, and one may say at least this— that its mode of life has 

 not produced a hard rough nodular surface on its feet by stimuli 

 of pressure and friction and response. 



One may observe that there's a divinity doth shape our ends, 

 rough hew them as we may, even if some objection be taken to the 

 present view of rough-hewing of parts of our organism on the 

 ground of its piecemeal character, rather than dealing with the 

 organism as a whole. To which it may be replied that the Mende- 

 hans give high support to the piecemeal study of the profound 

 subject of genetics, and further that the business here is to look 

 separately and simply at a few selected attributes of parts of 

 an organism, and see how they began to grow big enough to avoid 

 passing through the meshes of the sieve. 



The foregoing examples of animals in which papillary ridges 

 are absent have been given not in their zoological order, nor as 

 representative of a great many groups, but as taken from the 

 eighty-six species I examined myself. The following belong to the 

 same series, but all present papillary ridges in an ascending scale 

 towards perfection in man. 



Examples of Ridge-covered Palms and Soles. 



The common hedgehog though a burrowing animal like the 

 mole is not always underground as his distant relative is. He is 

 not always mining and though of ancient lineage he is a " slacker " 

 compared with the mole, hibernating for months, and spending 

 also much time in his nest and prowling slowly about above ground 

 for insects. He has thus acquired his somewhat indifferent epider- 

 mis that one finds, but with the addition of sparse papillary ridges. 

 It is the species among this list with the fewest of these tactile 

 structures, for there are but three or four separate ridges on six 

 of the ten digits, and radiating groups on only three of all the palmar 

 and plantar pads. So qua touch it is ill-equipped, though it has 

 adapted a higher form of tool than the rabbit. 



The common squirrel, that sits much and walks mainly on 

 branches of trees just as much as it needs to do, has an epidermis 

 little differentiated, and one which is corrugated with scanty 

 papillary ridges on the palmar and plantar pads, and none on the 

 digits. 



The squirrel-like phalanger which flies always more or less 

 downwards by a kind of parachute -arrangement has most of its 

 palmar and plantar skin covered with papillary ridges encroaching 



