8 CHILDHOOD OF ANIMALS 



not merely to its ancestry ; as much as the adult, it has to be fitted 

 to the special environment in which it Hves. It is not merely a stage 

 in development, but an independent living creature with its own 

 needs and its own aptitudes, presenting characters that are neither a 

 memory nor an anticipation, neither a relic of the past nor a pre- 

 paration for the future, but suitable for its own purposes. These 







Fig. 3. Head of an unborn gorilla. {After J. Deniker.) 



creatures, suckling their mothers, clinging to them and being pro- 

 tected by them, have an environment which is much simpler and 

 more nearly identical than the environment of the adults, and we 

 must expect, quite apart from common inheritance, to find common 

 characters due to common conditions. The figures on the first 

 coloured plate {see Frontispiece) represent young animals two or three 

 years old, and show how much more alike they are when they are 

 still children than when they are grown up. The young goriUa, with 

 its small ears and short upper lip, is not very different in appear- 

 ance from a black baby ; the very long upper lips of the orang and 



