THE SCAFFOLDING LEFT IN THE BODY. 95 



may only mean that we do not know its use. But 

 there are undoubtedly cases where we know that cer- 

 tain vestigial structures are not only useless to Man 

 but worse than useless. Coming under this category 

 is perhaps the most striking of all the vestigial organs, 

 that of the Vermiform Appendix of the Caecum. Here 

 is a structure which is not only of no use to man now, 

 but is a veritable death-trap. In herbivorous animals 

 this " blind-tube " is very large longer in some cases 

 than the body itself and of great use in digestion, but 

 in Man it is shrunken into the merest rudiment, while 

 in the Orang-outang it is only a little larger. In the 

 human subject, owing to its diminutive size, it can be 

 of no use whatever, while it forms an easy receptacle 

 for the lodgment of foreign bodies, such as fruit- 

 stones, which set up inflammation, and in various 

 ways cause death. In Man this tube is the same in 

 structure as the rest of the intestine ; it is " covered 

 with peritoneum, possesses a muscular coat, and is 

 lined with mucous membrane. In the early embryo it 

 is equal in calibre to the rest of the bowel, but at a 

 certain date it ceases to grow pari passu with it, and 

 at the time of birth appears as a thin tubular appendix 

 to the caecum. In the newly-born child it is often 

 absolutely as long as in the full-grown man. This 

 precocity is always an indication that the part was 

 of great importance to the ancestors of the human 

 species." * 



So important is the key of Evolution to the modern 

 pathologist that in cases of malformation his first 

 resort is always to seek an explanation in earlier 



1 Sutton, Evolution and Disease, p. 65. 



