522 THE EVOLUTION OF THE HUMAN FOOT. 



to tind most important information rogardino- the foot of primates 

 other than man. 



Still, oiving- to the anatomical facts which he had observed a false 

 interpretation, he thought that he was authorized to change the old 

 Ijinna?an classification, disrupting the order of the primates and 

 creating from part of it the order quadrumana, comprising the 

 monkey's or four-handed animals, contrasting with them the bimana, 

 comprising man, who alone is possessed of two hands and two feet. 



It was an unhapp}' innovation, seeming to placeman in a class apart 

 from the animals that most closely resemlde him and which really form 

 with him a natural group. 



After the" work of Cuvier we should cite that of Meckel and De 

 Blainville, who followed the road marked out by the mastei-, then 

 Vrolik, whose Treatise on the Anatomy of the Chimpanzee (18^11) con- 

 tains a comparative study of the foot of the higher primates. 



This author gives information as to the much less solid structure of 

 the tarsus of the anthropoids, the relative length and inclination of 

 the astragalus, the more or less oblique direction of the articular facet 

 of its head. He mentions, also, the special resemblance which exists 

 between the calcaneum of the gibbon and that of man, and it is very 

 interesting to note that he ventures to point out how defective, by 

 reason of the confusion it creates, is the appellation quadrumanna, 

 generally current at that time. 



In 1853, Burmeister began the study of the foot of the races of 

 man. It is about this time that a strong impulse was given to com- 

 parative anatomy by the transformation hypothesis. This naturally 

 affected the history of the osteology of the foot, and, in 1863, Huxley, 

 in his famous work, Man's Place in Nature, expressed very clearly 

 his objections to the term quadrumana, and restored man to his place 

 in the order of primates. At the same time Wyman discovered that 

 in the human embryo the great toe, instead of being parallel to the 

 others, makes, at a certain period of development, an angle with 

 them, as in the monkeys, an observation which, as one may well 

 believe, was specially calculated to break down the theory that the 

 lower extremity of monkeys could not be compared with that of 

 man; the same peculiarity was later noted by Leboucq. 



It was at this time that our illustrious founder, Broca, published his 

 Discourse Concerning Man and Animals. He there specially insisted 

 on the existence, in apes, of a veritable foot, and in 1869 he treated 

 definitely in his Order of Primates the question of the hand and the 

 foot, finally replacing man in a position beside the anthropoids, the 

 place which belongs to him, in spite of the arguments. of Luca?, who 

 still thought that the denomination bimana should be preserved. 



In Germany the study of the comparative anatoni}' of the foot was 



