Part 7 (1/2)
Falkenstein has given a detailed description of a gorilla which was remarkable for his delicacy in eating.
”He would take a cup or gla.s.s with the greatest care, using both hands to carry it to his mouth, and setting it down so carefully that I do not remember having lost a single piece of crockery through him, though we had never tried to teach him the use of such vessels, wis.h.i.+ng to bring him to Europe as nearly in his natural condition as possible.”
These and a mult.i.tude of similar observations which have been made since Huxley wrote are typical of the increase of our knowledge on the habits and capacities of the anthropoid apes. They all serve to show that in them the instinct for experimental investigation of everything with which they are surrounded, and their imitative faculties are peculiarly great. The importance of this, from the point of view of Huxley's argument, is great. The difference between the instincts of the lower animals and the intelligence of man is that instincts are to a large extent fixed and mechanical. The proper performance of an instinct demands the presence of exactly the right external conditions for its accomplishment. In the absence of these conditions, the call to perform the instinctive action is equally great, and results in useless performances. In many of the higher animals these elaborate instincts are more general in their character, and are supplemented by a considerable but varying apt.i.tude for modification of instinctive action to suit varieties of surrounding circ.u.mstances. As this intelligence becomes more and more developed, the blind, mechanical instinct becomes weaker. A large number of instances might be given of such instincts modified by dawning intelligence. The chief factors in producing the change are, as has been shewn by Professor Groos, the possession of a general instinct to imitate and to experiment, and the existence of a period of youth in which the young creature may practise these instincts, and so prepare itself for the more serious purposes of adult life. The anthropoid apes seem to possess these experimental instincts to an extent much greater than that observed in any other cla.s.s of animals, and, as they have a long period of youth, they have the opportunity of putting them into practice to the fullest possible extent.
From the natural history of the anthropoid apes, Huxley pa.s.sed to consideration of their relation to man, prefacing his observations with a pa.s.sage defending the utility of the enquiry, a pa.s.sage necessary enough in these days of prejudice, but now chiefly with historical interest:
”It will be admitted that some knowledge of man's position in the animate world is an indispensable preliminary to the proper understanding of his relations to the universe; and this again resolves itself in the long run into an enquiry into the nature and the closeness of the ties which connect him with those singular creatures whose history has been sketched in the preceding pages.
”The importance of such an enquiry is, indeed, intuitively manifest. Brought face to face with these blurred copies of himself, the least thoughtful of men is conscious of a certain shock; due perhaps not so much to disgust at the aspect of what looks like an insulting caricature, as to the awakening of a sudden and profound mistrust of time-honoured theories and strongly rooted prejudices regarding his own position in nature, and his relations to the underworld of life; while that which remains a dim suspicion for the unthinking, becomes a vast argument, fraught with the deepest consequences, for all who are acquainted with the recent progress of the anatomical and physiological sciences.”
Huxley then proceeded to elaborate the argument from development for the essential ident.i.ty of man and the apes. This argument has now become more or less familiar to us all, as it has gained additional support from recent extension of embryological knowledge, and as it has been used in every work on evolution since Huxley first laid stress on it. The adult forms of animals are much more complex than their embryonic stages, and the series of changes pa.s.sed through in attaining the adult condition make up the embryological history of the animal. Huxley took the embryology of the dog as an example of the process in the higher animals generally, and as it had been worked out in detail by a set of investigators. The dog, like all vertebrate animals, begins its existence as an egg; and this body is just as much an egg as that of a fowl, although, in the case of the dog, there is not the acc.u.mulation of nutritive material which bloats the egg of the hen into its enormous size. Since Huxley wrote, it has been shewn clearly that among the mammalian animals there has been a gradual reduction in the size of the egg. The ancestors of the mammals laid large eggs, like those of birds or reptiles; and there still exist two strange mammalian creatures, the Ornithorhynchus and Echidna of Australia, which lay large, reptilian-like eggs. The ancestors of most living mammalia acquired the habit of retaining the eggs within the body until they were hatched; and, as a result of this, certain structures which grow out from the embryo while it is still within the egg and become applied to the inner wall of the porous sh.e.l.l for the purpose of obtaining air, got their supply of oxygen, not from the outer air, but from the blood-vessels of the maternal tissues. When this connection (called the placenta) between embryo and mother through the egg-sh.e.l.l became more perfect, not only oxygen but food-material was obtained from the blood-vessels of the mother; and, in consequence, it became unnecessary for the eggs to be provided with a large supply of food-yolk. Among existing marsupial animals, which, on the whole, represent a lower type of mammalian structure than ordinary mammals, there is more food-yolk than in ordinary mammals, and less food-yolk than in the two egg-laying mammals. In the ordinary mammals, such as the rabbit, dog, monkey, and man, there is practically no yolk whatever deposited in the egg; the egg is of minute size, and the embryo obtains most of its food from the maternal blood.
The small egg of the mammal divides into a number of cells, which form a hollow sphere; on the upper surface of this the development of organs begins with the formation of a depression which indicates the future middle line of the animal, and is, in fact, the beginning of the nervous system. Under this is formed a straight rod of gelatinous material, the foundation of the vertebral column, and the body of the embryo is gradually pinched off from the surface of the hollow sphere.
After tracing the details of this process, Huxley proceeded as follows:
”The history of the development of any other vertebrate animal, lizard, snake, frog or fish, tells the same story. There is always, to begin with, an egg, having the same essential structure as that of the dog; the yolk of that egg always undergoes division, or segmentation, as it is often called; the ultimate products of that segmentation const.i.tute the building materials for the body of the young animal; and this is built up round a primitive groove, in the floor of which a notochord is developed. Furthermore, there is a period in which the young of all these animals resemble one another, not merely in outward form, but in all essentials of structure, so closely, that the differences between them are inconsiderable, while in their subsequent course they diverge more and more widely from one another. And it is a general law, that, the more closely any animals resemble one another in adult structure, the longer and the more intimately do their embryos resemble one another; so that, for example, the embryos of a snake and of a lizard remain like one another longer than do those of a snake and of a bird; and the embryos of a dog and of a cat remain like one another for a far longer period than do those of a dog and a bird; or of a dog and an opossum; or even than those of a dog and a monkey.”
This general rule, that the longer the paths of embryonic development of two animals keep identical the more nearly the two animals are related, when Huxley wrote, was founded on a much smaller number of facts than now are known. Since 1860 an enormous bulk of embryological investigation has been published, and the total result has been to confirm Huxley's position in the fullest possible way. A certain number of exceptions have been found, but these exceptions are so obviously special adaptations to special circ.u.mstances that their existence only makes the general truth of the proposition more clear.
The most common kind of exception occurs when two closely related animals live under very different conditions. For instance, many marine animals have close allies that in comparatively recent times have taken to live in fresh water. The conditions of life in fresh water are very different, especially for delicate creatures susceptible to rapid changes of temperature, or unable to withstand strong currents. Thus most of the allies of the fresh-water crayfish, which live in the sea, lay eggs from which there are soon hatched minute, almost transparent larvae, exceedingly unlike the adult. In the comparatively equable temperature of sea-water, and in the usual absence of strong currents, these small larvae, as Huxley shewed later in his volume on the _Crayfish_, live a free life, obtaining their own food, and by a series of slow transformations gradually acquire the adult form. In fresh water, however, the delicate larvae would be unable to live, and the mode of development is different. The series of slow transformations is condensed, and takes place almost entirely inside the egg-sh.e.l.l; so that, when hatching occurs, the young crayfish is exceedingly like the adult. Apart from such special cases, it is true that the study of development affords a clear test of closeness of structural affinity.
Huxley then proceeds to discuss the development of man.
”Is he something apart? Does he originate in a totally different way from dog, bird, frog, and fish, thus justifying those who a.s.sert him to have no place in nature, and no real affinity with the lower world of animal life? Or does he originate in a similar germ, pa.s.s through the same slow and gradually progressive modifications, depend on the same contrivances for protection and nutrition, and finally enter the world by the help of the same mechanism? The reply is not doubtful for a moment, and has not been doubtful any time these thirty years. Without question, the mode of origin, and the early stages of the development of man are identical with those of animals immediately below him in the scale; without doubt, in these respects, he is far nearer the apes than the apes are to the dog.”
Then, on lines with which, by continuous repet.i.tion and expansion by authors subsequent to him, we have now become familiar, Huxley compared, stage by stage, the development of man with that of other animals, and shewed, first, its essential similarity, and then that in every case where it departed from the development of the dog it resembled more closely the development of the ape. He went on to review the anatomy of man:
”Thus, identical in the physical processes by which he originates,--identical, in the early stages of his formation--identical in the mode of his nutrition before and after birth, with the animals which lie immediately below him in the scale,--Man, if his adult and perfect structure be compared with theirs exhibits, as might be expected, a marvellous likeness of organisation. He resembles them as they resemble one another--he differs from, them as they differ from one another.
And, though these differences cannot be weighed and measured, their value may be readily estimated; the scale or standard of judgment, touching that value, being afforded and expressed by the system of cla.s.sification of animals now current among zoologists.”
Having explained the general system of zoological cla.s.sification, he tried to dispel preliminary prejudice by inducing his readers or bearers to take an outside view of themselves.
”Let us endeavour for a moment to disconnect our thinking selves from the mask of humanity; let us imagine ourselves scientific Saturnians, if you will, fairly acquainted with such animals as now inhabit the earth, and employed in discussing the relations they bear to a new and singular 'erect and featherless biped,'
which some enterprising traveller, overcoming the difficulties of s.p.a.ce and gravitation, has brought from that distant planet for our inspection, well preserved, may be, in a cask of rum. We should all, at once, agree upon placing him among the mammalian vertebrates; and his lower jaw, his molars, and his brain, would leave no room for doubting the systematic position of the new genus among those mammals whose young are nourished during gestation by means of a placenta, or what are called the placental mammals.
”Further, the most superficial study would at once convince us that, among the orders of placental mammals, neither the whales, nor the hoofed creatures, nor the sloths and ant-eaters, nor the carnivorous cats, dogs, and bears, still less the rodent rats and rabbits, or the insectivorous moles and hedgehogs, or the bats, could claim our _h.o.m.o_ as one of themselves.
”There would remain, then, but one order for comparison, that of the apes (using that word in its broadest sense), and the question for discussion would narrow itself to this--Is Man so different from any of these apes that he must form an order by himself? Or does he differ less from them than they differ from one another,--and hence must take his place in the same order with them?
”Being happily free from all real or imaginary personal interest in the results of the enquiry thus set afoot, we should proceed to weigh the arguments on one side and on the other, with as much judicial calmness as if the question related to a new opossum.
We should endeavour to ascertain, without seeking either to magnify or diminish them, all the characters by which our new mammal differed from the apes; and if we found that these were of less structural value than those which distinguish certain members of the ape order from others universally admitted to be of the same order, we should undoubtedly place the newly discovered tellurian genus with them.”
In pursuit of this method, and taking the gorilla as the type for immediate comparison with man, he pa.s.sed in review the various anatomical structures, shewing that in every case man did not differ more from the gorilla than that differed from other anthropoids. We shall take a few examples of his method and results, reminding our readers, however, that Huxley carried his comparisons into every important part of the anatomical structure.
There is no part of the skeleton so characteristically human as the bones which form the pelvis, or bony girdle of the hips. The expanded haunch-bones form a basin-like structure which affords support to the soft internal viscera during the habitually upright position, and gives s.p.a.ce for the attachment of the very large muscles which help man to a.s.sume and support that att.i.tude. In the gorilla this region differs considerably from that in man. The haunch-bones are narrower and much shallower, so that they do not form so convenient a supporting basin; they have much less surface for the attachment of muscles. The gibbon, however, differs more vastly from the gorilla than that differs from man. The haunch-bones are flat and narrow, and totally devoid of any basin-like formation; the pa.s.sage through the pelvis is long and narrow, and the ischia have outwardly curved prominences, which, in life, are coated by callosities on which the animal habitually rests, and which are coa.r.s.e, corn-like patches of skin wholly absent in the gorilla, in the chimpanzee, in the orang, and in man.
In the characters of the hands, the feet, and the brain, certain real or supposed structural distinctions between man and the apes had been relied upon.