i PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESSé 595 
in Homo primigenius, his small prefrontal region, if we accept Boule and 
Anthony’s statements, is sufficient evidence of his lowly stage of intelligence and 
reason for his failure in the competition with the rest of mankind. 
Once the Simian ancestor of Man began to anticipate the consequences of his 
acts and put this knowledge and the growing appreciation of the powers of his 
hands to useful purpose, for using weapons, or even making them, the erect 
attitude would become a regular habit, so as to emancipate the hands entirely 
for their new duties. The realisation of his ability to defend himself upon the 
ground, once he had learned the use of sticks and stones as implements, would 
naturally have led the intelligent Ape to forsake the narrow life of the forest 
and roam at large in search of more abundant and attractive food and variety of 
scene. Like most creatures who live in the open, the adoption of social habits is 
one of the surest means of protection; for the eyes and ears of each individual 
thus become the servants of the whole community, giving warning of danger, and 
thus adding to the safety of the herd. The development of the legs then 
became a necessary condition of survival: for warnings of danger to animals 
living in the open are useless without fleetness of foot to escape or skill of arm to 
ward off the threatened danger. Thus we have come to realise the steps by 
which a growing brain makes it possible and desirable for the most intelligent 
of the Apes to forsake the purely arboreal life and seek a wider sphere of activity 
upon the earth: they emerged from their original forest home, and in troops 
invaded the open country, led on no doubt by the search for a more plentiful 
supply or a more appetising variety of food. Such an existence, demanding an 
ever-increasing skill to use implements of defence and to specialise the arms in 
using them, and at the same time fleeter limbs, better adapted for progression on 
the earth. would rapidly transform the limbs and specialise them each for its 
separate functions. 
Thus it is easy to conceive how it came to happen, once the evolution of the 
brain made it possible for the Ape to appreciate its ability to perform and 
anticipate the results of skilled actions, that he at once began to avail himself 
of the larger life that was opened before him. He already possessed the skill to 
use his hands, and this became emphasised with their added usefulness and value 
to their possessor, the more efficient brain, and increased delicacy of the hands 
themselves, once they ceased to be mere prehensile instruments. And the 
emancipation of the hands from progression threw the whole responsibility upon 
the legs, which became more efficient for their purpose as supports once they lost 
their prehensile powers and became elongated and specialised for rapid pro- 
gression. Thus the erect attitude became stereotyped and fixed and the limbs 
specialised, and these upright Simians emerged from their ancestral forests in 
societies, armed with sticks and stones, and with the rudiments of all the powers 
that eventually enabled them to conquer the world. The greater exposure to 
danger which these more adventurous spirits encountered once they emerged in 
the open, and the constant struggles these first semi-human creatures must have 
had in encounters with definite enemies, no less than with the forces of Nature, 
provided the factors which rapidly weeded out those unfitted for the new con- 
ditions, and by natural selection made real Men of the survivors. 
The growth in intelligence and in the powers of discrimination no doubt led 
to the dawning of a definite xsthetic sense, which, operating through sexual 
selection, brought about a gradual refinement of the features, added grace to the 
general build of the body, and demolished the greater part of its hairy covering. 
Tt also intensified the sexual distinctions, especially by developing in the female 
localised deposits of fatty tissue, not found in the.Apes, which produced pro- 
found alterations in the general form of the body. 
To one who considers what precisely it means to fix the attention and attempt 
the performance of some delicately adjusted and precise action it must be evident 
that one hand only can be usefully employed in executing the consciously skilled 
part in any given movement. The other hand, like the rest of the muscles of the 
whole body, can be only auxiliary to it, assisting, under the influence of atten- 
tion, either passively or actively, in steadying the body or helping the dominant 
hand. Moreover, it is clear that if one hand is constantly employed for doing 
the more skilled work, it will learn to perform it more precisely and more success- 
fully than either would if both were trained, in spite of what ambidextral 
enthusiasts may say. Hence it happened that when Nature was fashioning Man 
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