LEMURS, MONKEYS, AND MAN 371 



space between the placing of the teeth, and in the small develop- 

 ment of the canines, which project but little, if at all, beyond the 

 line of the incisors and premolars. He is also able to assume 

 without difficulty the erect position, and to walk erect without 

 stooping or shambling. His body, moreover, as compared with 

 apes and monkeys, is nearly hairless. Like them, he has no out- 

 ward tail, the tail bones being tucked under the pelvis, or basin. 

 Unlike them, the first toe in the feet can no longer be used as 

 an opposable thumb ; it has become the longest and biggest toe 

 of the foot. On it the chief weight is thrown in walking, and 

 the rest of the toes are tending towards disappearance, so that 

 man is on his way to becoming a one-toed animal, not by the 

 extreme development of the middle toe, as in the horse, but 

 by the extravagant growth of that first toe, which is so often 

 reduced to uselessness or lost altogether in the other Mammalia. 

 There are many slight diflTerences in the structure of man's 

 skeleton and soft parts which separate him from the anthropoid 

 apes and the monkeys, and there is, of course, that wonderful 

 cranial development, which, however, has constantly occurred in 

 past ages in a slighter degree in the development of other 

 Primates — lemurs and American monkeys ; though, owing to the 

 want of help from local circumstances, it resulted in nothing. 

 Putting sentiment aside, it is sometimes questionable whether 

 physiologists should rank the physical difference between man 

 and apes as more than attributable to a sub-family. In the early 

 part of the nineteenth century, before the teaching of Darwin 

 had revolutionised zoological classification, man was placed in 

 an order by himself. On the other hand, in the middle of 

 the eighteenth century the great Swedish naturalist, Linnaeus, 

 scarcely regarded the difference between man and the higher 

 apes as more than generic. In the absence of further infor- 

 mation, however, regarding the connecting links which once 

 existed between man and the earlier types of anthropoid apes, it 

 is perhaps reasonable to give him a separate family {Hominida) 

 to himself. 



