142 
THE DESCENT OF MAN. 
Part I. 
as the hands became perfected for prehension, r the 
feet should have become perfected for support and 
locomotion. With some savages, however, the foot has 
not altogether lost its prehensile power, as shewn by 
their manner of climbing trees and of using them in 
other ways . 66 
If it be an advantage to man to have his hands and 
arms free and to stand firmly on his feet, of which there 
can be no doubt from his pre-eminent success in the 
battle of life, then I can see no reason why it should 
not have been advantageous to the progenitors of man 
to have become more and more erect or bipedal. They 
would thus have been better able to have defended 
themselves with stones or clubs, or to have attacked 
their prey, or otherwise obtained food. The best con- 
structed individuals would in the long run have succeeded 
best, and have survived in larger numbers. If the 
gorilla and a few allied forms had become extinct, it 
might have been argued with great force and apparent 
truth, that an animal could not have been gradually 
converted from a quadruped into a biped; as all the 
individuals in an intermediate condition would have 
been miserably ill-fitted for progression. But we know 
(and this is well worthy of reflection) that several kinds 
of apes are now actually in this intermediate condition ; 
and no one doubts that they are on the whole well 
adapted for their conditions of life. Thus the gorilla 
runs with a sidelong shambling gait, but more commonly 
66 Hackel lias an excellent discussion on tlie steps by which man 
became a biped : ‘ Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte/ 1868, s. 507. Dr. 
Biichner (‘ Conferences sur la Theorie Darwinienne,’ 1869, p. 135) has 
given good cases of the use of the foot as a prehensile organ by man ; 
also on the manner of progression of the higher apes to which I allude 
in the following paragraph : see also Owen (‘ Anatomy of Vertebrates/ 
vol. iii. p. 71) on this latter subject. 
