CORPOREAL CHARACTERISTICS OF MAN. 11 



were their situation so changed, the provision for the sitting pos- 

 ture would be comparatively useless. 



While some, perversely desirous of degrading their race, have 

 attempted to remove a splendid distinction by asserting that we 

 are constructed for all fours, others with equal perverseness and 

 ignorance have asserted that monkeys are destined for the upright 

 posture. The monkey tribe, it is true, maintain the erect posture 

 less awkwardly than other brutes with four extremities, but they 

 cannot maintain it long, and, while in it, they bend their knees 

 and body ; they are insecure and tottering, and glad to rest upon 

 a stick ; their feet, too, instead of being spread for support, are 

 coiled up as if to grasp something. In fact their structure proves 

 them to be neither biped nor quadruped, but four-handed, ani- 

 mals. They live naturally in trees, and are furnished with four 

 hands for grasping the branches and gathering their food. Of 

 their four hands the posterior are even the more perfect, and are 

 in no instance destitute of a thumb, although, like the thumbs of 

 all the quadrumana, so insignificant as to have been termed by 

 Eustachius, " omnino ridiculus;" whereas the anterior hands of 

 .one variety (slmia paniscus) have not this organ. The whole 

 length of the orang utan, it may be mentioned, falls very much 

 short of ours. 



It was anciently supposed that man, because gifted with the 

 highest mental endowments, possessed the largest of all brains. 

 But as elephants and whales surpass him in this respect, and the 

 sagacious monkey and dog have smaller brains than the com- 

 paratively stupid ass, ox, and hog, the opinion was relinquished 

 by the moderns, and man was said only to have the largest brain 

 in proportion to the size of his body. But as more extensive 

 observation proved canary and other birds, and some varieties of 

 the monkey tribe, to have larger brains than man in proportion 

 to the body, and several mammalia to equal him in this particular, 

 and as rats and mice too surpass the dog, the horse, and the 

 elephant, in the comparative bulk of their brains, this opinion 

 also gave way, in its turn, to that of Sommerring, that man 

 possesses the largest brain in comparison with the nerves arising 

 from it. This has not yet been contradicted, although the com- 

 parative size of the brain to the nerves originating from it (grant- 

 ing that they originate from it) is not an accurate measure of the 

 faculties, because the seal has in proportion to its nerves a larger 



