MAN AND APES. 



293 



old belief, has taken the useless trouble of proving- that 

 the skull of the orang could not possibly be transformed 

 into the human head. As if the doctrine of Descent had 

 ever asserted such nonsense! The bony skull of these 

 apes has reached an extreme, comparable to that of our 

 domestic cattle. But this extreme appears only grad- 

 ually in the course of growth, and the calf knows little 

 of it, but possesses, as we have already mentioned, the 

 cranial form of its antelope-like ancestors. In the present 

 antelopes, and likewise in goats and sheep, this form, 

 transitory in the calf, has remained stable. Now, as the 

 youthful skull of the anthropomorphous apes exhibits, 

 with undeniable distinctness, a descent from progenitors 

 with a well-formed and still plastic cranium, and a den- 

 tition approximating to that of man, the transformation 

 of these parts in conjunction with the brain, the latter 

 by reason of its persistently small volume, has, as it were, 

 struck out a disastrous path, while in the human branch, 

 selection has effected a higher conservation of these 

 cranial characters. 



With this falls also the objection recently raised by the 

 venerable Karl Ernest v. Baer, that it is inconceivable 

 how, from, the monkey's feet, arranged for climbing and 

 grasping, the human foot, adapted for flat treading and 

 walking, should be evolved in the struggle for existence. 

 The tendency to oppose the big toe to the others, that is, 

 to a prehensile foot, is known to be a human attribute, 

 and this tendency is certainly inherited. How far the 

 capacity for climbing may have been developed in the 

 primordial ancestors, is as much unknown as these pri- 

 mordial ancestors themselves. Thus the aptitude in 

 climbing shown by most of the present monkeys is only 



