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. Asif 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 gra- 
dually 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 pre- 
sent 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 exhi- 
bits, with undeniable distinctness, a descent from proge- 
nitors with a well-formed and still plastic cranium, and a 
dentition approximating to that of man, the transforma- 
tion 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 teadency is certainly inherited. How far the capa- 
city for climbing may have been developed in the pri- 
mordialancestors, is as much unknown as these primordial 
ancestors themselves. Thus the aptitude in climbing 
shown by most of the present monkeys is only remotely 
