﻿Introduction. 23 



necessarily be " one Supreme Intelligence," but some 

 other order of Personality standing anywhere in 

 "an infinite chasm between man and the Great Mind 

 of the universe 1 ." Let us consider separately the 

 corporeal and the mental peculiarities which are given 

 as justifying this important conclusion. 



The bodily peculiarities are the feet, the hands, the 

 brain, the voice, and the naked skin. 



As regards the feet Mr. Wallace writes, " It is 

 difficult to see why the prehensile power [of the great 

 toe] should have been taken away," because, although 

 " it may not be compatible with perfectly easy erect 

 locomotion," " how can we conceive that early man, 

 as an animal, gained anything by purely erect 

 locomotion 2 ? " But surely it is not difficult to con- 

 ceive this. In the proportion that our simian 

 progenitors ceased to be arboreal in their habits (and 

 there may well have been very good utilitarian reasons 

 for such a change of habitat, analogous to those 

 which are known to have occurred in the phylogenesis 

 of countless other animals), it would clearly have been 

 of advantage to them that their already semi-erect 

 attitude should have been rendered more and more 

 erect. To name one among several probabilities, the 

 more erect the attitude, and the more habitually it was 

 assumed, the more would the hands have been 

 liberated for all the important purposes of mani- 

 pulation. The principle of the physiological division 

 of labour would thus have come more and more into 

 play : natural selection would therefore have rendered 

 the upper extremities more and more suited to the 



1 Natural Selection and Tropical Nature,^. 205; 1891. 



2 Ibid, pp. 197-8. 



