Part 13 (2/2)

Finally, the Edentates (sloths, anteaters, and armadilloes) are represented in a very primitive form in the early Eocene. They are then barely distinguishable from the Condylarthra and Creodonta, and seem only recently to have issued from a common ancestor with those groups.

In the course of the Tertiary we find them--especially in South America, which was cut off from the North and its invading Carnivores during the Eocene and Miocene--developed into large sloths, armadilloes, and anteaters. The reconnection with North America in the Pliocene allowed the northern animals to descend, but gigantic sloths (Megatherium) and armadilloes (Glyptodon) flourished long afterwards in South America.

The Megatherium attained a length of eighteen feet in one specimen discovered, and the Glyptodon often had a dorsal s.h.i.+eld (like that of the armadillo) from six to eight feet long, and, in addition, a stoutly armoured tail several feet long.

The richness and rapidity of the mammalian development in the Tertiary, of which this condensed survey will convey some impression, make it impossible to do more here than glance over the vast field and indicate the better-known connections. It will be seen that evolution not only introduces a lucid order and arrangement into our thousands of species of living and fossil mammals, but throws an admirable light on the higher animal world of our time. The various orders into which the zoologist puts our mammals are seen to be the branches of a living tree, approaching more and more closely to each other in early Tertiary times, in spite of the imperfectness of the geological record. We at last trace these diverging lines to a few very primitive, generalised, patriarchal groups, which in turn approach each other very closely in structure, and plainly suggest a common Cretaceous ancestor. Whether that common ancestor was an Edentate, an Insectivore, or Creodont, or something more primitive than them all, is disputed. But the divergence of nearly all the lines of our mammal world from those patriarchal types is admirably clear. In the mutual struggle of carnivore and herbivore, in adaptation to a hundred different environments (the water, the land, and the air, the tree, the open plain, the underground, the marsh, etc.) and forms of diet, we find the descendants of these patriarchal animals gradually developing their distinctive characters. Then we find the destructive agencies of living and inorganic nature blotting out type after type, and the living things that spread over the land in the later Tertiary are found to be broadly identical with the living things of to-day. The last great selection, the northern Ice-Age, will give the last touches of modernisation.

CHAPTER XVIII. THE EVOLUTION OF MAN

We have reserved for a closer inquiry that order of the placental mammals to which we ourselves belong, and on which zoologists have bestowed the very proper and distinguis.h.i.+ng name of the Primates. Since the days of Darwin there has been some tendency to resent the term ”lower animals,” which man applies to his poorer relations. But, though there is no such thing as an absolute standard by which we may judge the ”higher” or ”lower” status of animals or plants, the extraordinary power which man has by his brain development attained over both animate and inanimate nature fully justifies the phrase. The Primate order is, therefore, of supreme interest as the family that gave birth to man, and it is important to discover the agencies which impelled some primitive member of it to enter upon the path which led to this summit of organic nature.

The order includes the femurs, a large and primitive family with ape-like features--the Germans call them ”half-apes”--the monkeys, the man-like apes, and man. This cla.s.sification according to structure corresponds with the successive appearance of the various families in the geological record. The femurs appear in the Eocene; the monkeys, and afterwards the apes, in the Miocene, the first semi-human forms in the Pleistocene, though they must have been developed before this. It is hardly necessary to say that science does not regard man as a descendant of the known anthropoid apes, or these as descended from the monkeys.

They are successive types or phases of development, diverging early from each other. Just as the succeeding horse-types of the record are not necessarily related to each other in a direct line, yet ill.u.s.trate the evolution of a type which culminates in the horse, so the spreading and branching members of the Primate group ill.u.s.trate the evolution of a type of organism which culminates in man. The particular relations.h.i.+p of the various families, living and dead, will need careful study.

That there is a general blood-relations.h.i.+p, and that man is much more closely related to the anthropoid apes than to any of the lower Primates, is no longer a matter of controversy. In Rudolph Virchow there died, a few years ago, the last authoritative man of science to express any doubt about it. There are, however, non-scientific writers who, by repeating the ambiguous phrase that it is ”only a theory,” convey the impression to inexpert readers that it is still more or less an open question. We will therefore indicate a few of the lines of evidence which have overcome the last hesitations of scientific men, and closed the discussion as to the fact.

The very close a.n.a.logy of structure between man and the ape at once suggests that they had a common ancestor. There are cases in which two widely removed animals may develop a similar organ independently, but there is a.s.suredly no possibility of their being alike in all organs, unless by common inheritance. Yet the essential ident.i.ty of structure in man and the ape is only confirmed by every advance of science, and would of itself prove the common parentage. Such minor differences as there are between man and the higher ape--in the development of the cerebrum, the number of the teeth or ribs, the distribution of the hair, and so on--are quite explicable when we reflect that the two groups must have diverged from each other more than a million years ago.

Examining the structure of man more closely, we find this strong suggestion of relations.h.i.+p greatly confirmed. It is now well known that the human body contains a number of vestigial ”organs”--organs of no actual use, and only intelligible as vestiges of organs that were once useful. Whatever view we take of the origin of man, each organ in his frame must have a meaning; and, as these organs are vestigial and useless even in the lowest tribes of men, who represent primitive man, they must be vestiges of organs that were of use in a remote pre-human ancestor. The one fact that the ape has the same vestigial organs as man would, on a scientific standard of evidence, prove the common descent of the two. But these interesting organs themselves point back far earlier than a mixed ape-human ancestor in many cases.

The sh.e.l.l of cartilage which covers the entrance to the ear--the gristly appendage which is popularly called the ear--is one of the clearest and most easily recognised of these organs. The ”ear” of a horse or a cat is an upright mobile sh.e.l.l for catching the waves of sound. The human ear has the appearance of being the shrunken relic of such an organ, and, when we remove the skin, and find seven generally useless muscles attached to it, obviously intended to pull the sh.e.l.l in all directions (as in the horse), there can be no doubt that the external ear is a discarded organ, a useless legacy from an earlier ancestor. In cases where it has been cut off it was found that the sense of hearing was scarcely, if at all, affected. Now we know that it is similarly useless in all tribes of men, and must therefore come from a pre-human ancestor.

It is also vestigial in the higher apes, and it is only when we descend to the lower monkeys and femurs that we see it approaching its primitive useful form. One may almost say that it is a reminiscence of the far-off period when, probably in the early Tertiary, the ancestors of the Primates took to the trees. The animals living on the plain needed acute senses to detect the approach of their prey or their enemies; the tree-dweller found less demand on his sense of hearing, the ”speaking-trumpet” was discarded, and the development of the internal ear proceeded on the higher line of the perception of musical sounds.

We might take a very large number of parts of the actual human body, and discover that they are similar historical or archaeological monuments surviving in a modern system, but we have s.p.a.ce only for a few of the more conspicuous.

The hair on the body is a vestigial organ, of actual use to no race of men, an evident relic of the thick warm coat of an earlier ancestor. It in turn recalls the dwellers in the primeval forest. In most cases--not all, because the wearing of clothes for ages has modified this feature--it will be found that the hairs on the arm tend upward from the wrist to the elbow, and downward from the shoulder to the elbow. This very peculiar feature becomes intelligible when we find that some of the apes also have it, and that it has a certain use in their case. They put their hands over their heads as they sit in the trees during ram, and in that position the sloping hair acts somewhat like the thatched roof of a cottage.

Again, it will be found that in the natural position of standing we are not perfectly flat-footed, but tend to press much more on the outer than on the inner edge of the foot. This tendency, surviving after ages of living on the level ground, is a lingering effect of the far-off arboreal days.

A more curious reminiscence is seen in the fact that the very young infant, flabby and powerless as it is in most of its muscles, is so strong in the muscles of the hand and arm that it can hang on to a stick by its hands, and sustain the whole weight of its body, for several minutes. Finally, our vestigial tail--for we have a tail comparable to that of the higher apes--must be mentioned. In embryonic development the tail is much longer than the legs, and some children are born with a real tail, which they move as the puppy does, according to their emotional condition. Other features of the body point back to an even earlier stage. The vermiform appendage--in which some recent medical writers have vainly endeavoured to find a utility--is the shrunken remainder of a large and normal intestine of a remote ancestor. This interpretation of it would stand even if it were found to have a certain use in the human body. Vestigial organs are sometimes pressed into a secondary use when their original function has been lost. The danger of this appendage in the human body to-day is due to the fact that it is a blind alley leading off the alimentary ca.n.a.l, and has a very narrow opening. In the ape the opening is larger, and, significantly enough, it is still larger in the human foetus. When we examine some of the lower mammals we discover the meaning of it. It is in them an additional storage chamber in the alimentary system. It is believed that a change to a more digestible diet has made this additional chamber superfluous in the Primates, and the system is slowly suppressing it.

Other reminiscences of this earlier phase are found in the many vestigial muscles which are found in the body to-day. The head of the quadruped hangs forward, and is held by powerful muscles and ligaments in the neck. We still have the shrunken remainder of this arrangement.

Other vestigial muscles are found in the forehead, the scalp, the nose--many people can twitch the nostrils and the scalp--and under the skin in many parts of the body. These are enfeebled remnants of the muscular coat by which the quadruped twitches its skin, and drives insects away. A less obvious feature is found by the anatomist in certain blood-vessels of the trunk. As the blood flows vertically in a biped and horizontally in a quadruped, the arrangement of the valves in the blood-vessels should be different in the two cases; but it is the same in us as in the quadruped. Another trace of the quadruped ancestor is found in the baby. It walks ”on all fours” so long, not merely from weakness of the limbs, but because it has the spine of a quadruped.

A much more interesting fact, but one less easy to interpret, is that the human male has, like the male ape, organs for suckling the young.

That there are real milk-glands, usually vestigial, underneath the teats in the breast of the boy or the man is proved by the many known cases in which men have suckled the young. Several friends of the present writer have seen this done in India and Ceylon by male ”wet-nurses.” As there is no tribe of men or species of ape in which the male suckles the young normally, we seem to be thrown back once more upon an earlier ancestor.

The difficulty is that we know of no mammal of which both parents suckle the young, and some authorities think that the b.r.e.a.s.t.s have been transferred to the male by a kind of embryonic muddle. That is difficult to believe, as no other feature has ever been similarly transferred to the opposite s.e.x. In any case the male b.r.e.a.s.t.s are vestigial organs.

Another peculiarity of the mammary system is that sometimes three, four, or five pairs of b.r.e.a.s.t.s appear in a woman (and several have been known even in a man). This is, apparently, an occasional reminiscence of an early mammal ancestor which had large litters of young and several pairs of b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

But there are features of the human body which recall an ancestor even earlier than the quadruped. The most conspicuous of these is the little fleshy pad at the inner corner of each eye. It is a common feature in mammals, and is always useless. When, however, we look lower down in the animal scale we find that fishes and reptiles (and birds) have a third eyelid, which is drawn across the eye from this corner. There is little room to doubt that the little fleshy vestige in the mammal's eye is the shrunken remainder of the lateral eyelid of a remote fish-ancestor.

A similar reminiscence is found in the pineal body, a small and useless object, about the size and shape of a hazel-nut, in the centre of the brain. When we examine the reptile we find a third eye in the top of the head. The skin has closed over it, but the skull is still, in many cases, perforated as it is for the eyes in front. I have seen it standing out like a ball on the head of a dead crocodile, and in the living tuatara--the very primitive New Zealand lizard--it still has a retina and optic nerve. As the only animal in nature to-day with an eye in this position (the Pyrosome, a little marine animal of the sea-squirt family) is not in the line of reptile and mammal ancestry, it is difficult to locate the third eye definitely. But when we find the skin closing over it in the amphibian and reptile, then the bone, and then see it gradually atrophying and being buried under the growing brain, we must refer it to some early fish-ancestor. This ancestor, we may recall, is also reflected for a time in the gill-slits and arches, with their corresponding fish-like heart and blood-vessels, during man's embryonic development, as we saw in a former chapter.

These are only a few of the more conspicuous instances of vestigial structures in man. Metchnikoff describes about a hundred of them. Even if there were no remains of primitive man pointing in the direction of a common ancestry with the ape, no lower types of men in existence with the same tendency, no apes found in nature to-day with a structure so strikingly similar to that of man, and no fossil records telling of the divergence of forms from primitive groups in past time, we should be forced to postulate the evolution of man in order to explain his actual features. The vestigial structures must be interpreted as we interpret the b.u.t.tons on the back of a man's coat. They are useless reminiscences of an age in which they were useful. When their witness to the past is supported by so many converging lines of evidence it becomes irresistible. I will add only one further testimony which has been brought into court in recent years.

The blood consists of cells, or minute disk-shaped corpuscles, floating in a watery fluid, or serum. It was found a few years ago, in the course of certain experiments in mixing the blood of animals, that the serum of one animal's blood sometimes destroyed the cells of the other animal's blood, and at other times did not. When the experiments were multiplied, it was found that the amount of destructive action exercised by one specimen of blood upon another depended on the nearness or remoteness of relations.h.i.+p between the animals. If the two are closely related, there is no disturbance when their blood is mixed; when they are not closely related, the serum of one destroys the cells of the other, and the intensity of the action is in proportion to their remoteness from each other. Another and more elaborate form of the experiment was devised, and the law was confirmed. On both tests it was found by experiment that the blood of man and of the anthropoid ape behaved in such a way as to prove that they were closely related. The blood of the monkey showed a less close relations.h.i.+p--a little more remote in the New World than in the Old World monkeys; and the blood of the femur showed a faint and distant relations.h.i.+p.

The FACT of the evolution of man and the apes from a common ancestor is, therefore, outside the range of controversy in science; we are concerned only to retrace the stages of that evolution, and the agencies which controlled it. Here, unfortunately, the geological record gives us little aid. Tree-dwelling animals are amongst the least likely to be buried in deposits which may preserve their bones for ages. The distribution of femur and ape remains shows that the order of the Primates has been widespread and numerous since the middle of the Tertiary Era, yet singularly few remains of the various families have been preserved.

Hence the origin of the Primates is obscure. They are first foreshadowed in certain femur-like forms of the Eocene period, which are said in some cases (Adapis) to combine the characters of pachyderms and femurs, and in others (Anaptomorphus) to unite the features of Insectivores and femurs. Perhaps the more common opinion is that they were evolved from a branch of the Insectivores, but the evidence is too slender to justify an opinion. It was an age when the primitive placental mammals were just beginning to diverge from each other, and had still many features in common. For the present all we can say is that in the earliest spread of the patriarchal mammal race one branch adopted arboreal life, and evolved in the direction of the femurs and the apes. The generally arboreal character of the Primates justifies this conclusion.

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