Darwin made easy / by Edward B. Aveling.

  • Edward Aveling
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Darwin made easy / by Edward B. Aveling. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    (a) We have hairs nearly all over onr body. It is true that they are rudimentary. But they are present. Hold the hand up so that the light shines across the back of it, and the minute hairs are visible. Everywhere with the exception of the back of the extreme joints of the digits these rudimentary structures are to be seen. This is meaningless if we are made in god’s own image, as we have no evidence as to the distribution of hair on the body of deity. But if we have risen from a lower form of animal these hairs are rudiments of the coating that in our progenitors invested the body completely. [See p. 30 ‘‘Darwinian Theory.”] (ib) In many cases the amount of hair on the body is in proportion to the animal nature of the individual. Of course this ratio cannot be said to be invariable, as certain low savage races are without hair on the body. But in most of the civilised peoples the more hairy the skin is, the lower is the type of man. The huge powerful “ navvy,” whose muscular system is strongly developed, and in whom the intellectual faculties are not highly developed, has shaggy arms, legs, and chest. (c) Physiologists tell us that the human embryo or foetus before birth is covered with a soft down called the lanugo (woolliness) that disappears after a time. This temporary covering of hair-like material is intelligible on the hypothesis of the evolution of man from a hair-covered animal. (d) The cases of ape-men, or microcephali. These are, as I have already said, children of normal human parents, that revert to the simian type. These monsters, with their receding foreheads, their difficulty in walking, or inability to walk, upright, their habit of swinging from piece to piece of furniture, their ape-like grimaces, are covered as to their bodies either completely, or to a great extent, with hair. 2. The skeleton.—Just as the exoskeleton (outer protective organs) or hair covering of man does not differ essentially from that of his allies, so the endoskeleton (inner protective and supporting organs of man) differs in no essential from that of his allies. Every bone, every prominence on every bone, every marking for the attachment of muscles is the same in man as in the anthropoid apes. Of course there is not much difficulty, even to the non-anatomical mind, in distinguishing the skeleton of a European from that of a gorilla. But the
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