100 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP 



peculiarities developed by our simian ancestors 

 wholly on account of the incentives to such 

 structure and posture afforded by aboreal life. 

 These peculiarities would not likely have been 

 acquired by quadrupeds living upon and taking 

 their food from a perfectly level and treeless plain. 

 If there had been no forests on the earth, there- 

 fore, there would have been no incentive to the 

 perpendicular, and the ' human form divine ' would 

 have been inconceivably different from what it is 

 to-day. And if fishes had had three serial pairs 

 of limbs instead of two, and their posterity had 

 inherited them, as they certainly would have had 

 the foresight to do if they had had the opportunity, 

 the highest animals on the earth to-day, the 

 * paragons of creation,' would probably be two- 

 handed quadrupeds (centaurs) instead of two- 

 handed bipeds. And much more efficient and 

 ideal individuals they would have been in every 

 way than the rickety, peculiar, unsubstantial 

 plantigrades who, by their talent to talk, have 

 become the masters of the universe, and, by their 

 imaginations, * divine.' 



Kinship is universal. The orders, families, 

 species, and races of the animal kingdom are the 

 branches of a gigantic arbour. Every individual is 

 a cell, every species is a tissue, and every order is 

 an organ in the great surging, suffering, palpitat- 

 ing process. Man is simply one portion of the 

 immense enterprise. He is as veritably an animal 

 as the insect that drinks its little fill from his 

 veins, the ox he goads, or the wild-fox that flees 



