190 WALTER KIDD, ESQ., M.D., F.Z.S., 



and in so doiug casts grave reflections upon the efficiency of 

 natural selection. It is not here a question of a trifling- 

 degenerate muscle, or a fold of mucous membrane, which is 

 either useless or slightly useful to the possessor, but of a 

 structure which is frecjuently the seat of serious and fatal 

 inflammation by reason of its position. It is said to be func- 

 tionless : but a worse indictment is brought against it for the 

 danger which it constitutes to its possessor. It is the sub- 

 ject of language almost abusive in character, and as some 

 think of surgical abuse, being considered by certain author- 

 ities so perilous to the young as to warrant its excision. 

 All the reflections cast upon the vermiform appendix cannot 

 fail to interest the opponent of evolution. Here at last was 

 something tangible and valuable that natural selection, in 

 the course of many thousand years, might have brought 

 about, viz., elimhiation from the human body of a structure 

 so dangerous to it in its struggle for existence. 



The strong inward deflection of the foot of the human 

 infant is taken as a vestigial character, inherited from simian 

 ancestors ; an entirely uniiecessary view of it, when the 

 many months during which the foetal foot is in this position 

 are taken into account. 



The memhrana niditans of all vertebrate animals is of 

 more or less functional value, especially no doubt in birds 

 and fishes, but the plica semilunaris in the liuman subject is 

 (jf manifest value, by its action as a kind of ledge, over which 

 various small foreign bodies are pushed into a safer position 

 than if this little fold were absent from the deeply set iinier 

 corner of the eye. 



Certain facts connected with the distribution of hair on the 

 human body are supposed to point back to a simian ancestry. 

 Of these the distribution of hair on the forearm of man and 

 the higher apes is incorrectly described by Romanes in* 

 Darwin afUr IJarivin, and the whole subject dealt Avith in a 

 partial manner, as shown in papers treating of this subject.f 

 The lower forms of life are held to be full of vestigial stnic- 

 tiues, l)ut, by whatever theory tliey are met, great difficulties 

 remain. The aborted pelvic limbs and their arches, ol python 

 and tortrix, the only two of about a thousand species of 

 snakes which possess them, are most obscure on any theory, 



* pix 89, 91. 



+ 77ie Ui/ficuUies of EcohUion, Walter Kidd, ]NJ.D., Victoria Institute, 

 May 4, 1896 ; Nature, January 7, 1897, p. 267. 



