90 Evolution 



in Madras. These male breasts clearly point back to a 

 time when, in some ancestral stage, there was a more 

 equitable division — from the mother's point of view — of 

 the family work.* Moreover, we often find more than 

 one pair of breasts (up to five pairs) in women, and 

 sometimes in men. Here again (as Dr. A. R. Wallace 

 has shown) we have an ancestral reminiscence. They 

 are an arrest of mammary development at the stage of 

 an ancestor with five, four, three, or two pairs of 

 breasts. 



Another easily verified instance is the external ear. 

 This is often regarded as a kind of speaking trumpet, 

 bringing the waves of sound to the internal ear. Now, 

 the erect mobile ear of the cat or the horse is such a 

 trumpet, but a trumpet flattened down with a hammer 

 (and so useless) would be the correct equivalent of ours. 

 Men whose ears have been cut off (in Bulgarian 

 atrocities) do not suffer in hearing. And when the 

 anatomist removes the skin round the ear he discovers 

 a group of muscles attached to each human ear that are 

 just as useless. Two of them (for pulling it backward 

 or forward) can be used by many people, and one of the 

 others can be used by a few ; but they are quite useless, 

 and two of them are never known to act. The whole 

 apparatus only serves to remind us of our ape-like and 

 earlier ancestors with erect ears, which they could pull 

 in all directions to catch the waves of sound. 



In the eye we have another vestigial structure. The 

 little fleshy pad that we find at the inner corner of each 

 eye, over the tear gland, has no function whatever. The 

 only explanation of its existence there is that it is the 



* Haeckel attributes them rather to a transfer, by some 

 freak of heredity, to the male ; but the above is the general 

 interpretation. 



