Part 6

The first birds had teeth and vertebrated tails. The archeopteryx, which is the earliest toothed bird whose remains have yet been found, was about the size of a crow. It had thirty-two teeth and twenty caudal vertebrae. Two specimens of it have been found in the Jurassic slates of Bavaria. One of these fossils is in the British Museum, and the other in the Museum of Berlin. Other toothed birds have been found fossil by Dr. Mudge in the cretaceous chalk of North America. These last had short, fan tails like existing birds.

From the toothed birds developed the beaked birds—the keel-breasted birds (the group to which most existing birds belong) and the birds with unkeeled breasts, i.e., the ostrich-like birds. The ostrich-like birds are runners. They have rudimentary wings, and the keel of the breast-bone, which in the keel-breasted birds acts as a stay for the attachment of the wing muscles, is lacking. The ostrich-like birds are probably degenerate flyers, the flying apparatus having become obsolete through disuse. The feathers of birds are generally supposed to be the modified scales of reptiles.

The most brilliant offspring of the reptiles were the mammals, animals capable of a wider distribution over the face of the earth than the cold-blooded reptiles, on account of their hair and their warm blood. Cold-blooded animals of great size are able to inhabit but a small zone of the existing earth’s surface—the torrid belt. They cannot house themselves during the seasons of cold, as men can; nor escape to the tropics on the wings of the wind, as do the birds; nor bury themselves in subaqueous mud, as do the frogs, snakes, and crustaceans. During the Mesozoic period, when cold-blooded reptiles of gigantic size flourished over a wide area of the earth’s surface, the planet was far warmer than now. Animals, therefore, like the mammals (or birds), capable of maintaining a fixed temperature regardless of the thermal fluctuations of the surrounding media, are the only animals of large size and power capable of uninterrupted existence over the greater part of the surface of the existing earth. The pre-eminent life of the Cenozoic time was mammalian. But the decline and fall of the saurian power was not wholly due to the rise of the more dynamic mammals. It was in part due, no doubt, to adverse conditions of climate, and also to the fact that mammals and birds guard their eggs, and saurians do not.

The lowest of the mammals are the monotremes, animals which blend in a marvellous manner the characteristics of birds, reptiles, and mammals. Only two families of these old-fashioned creatures are left, the echidna and the duck-bill (ornithorhynchus), both of them found on or near that museum of biological antiquities, Australia. They are covered with hair and suckle their young like other mammals, but they have only the rudiments of milk glands, and they lay eggs with large yolks from a cloaca, like the reptiles and birds. The duck-bill hides its eggs in the ground, but the echidna hatches its eggs in a small external brooding pouch, periodically developed for this purpose. The young of the monotremes feed on the oily perspiration which exudes from the body of the mother. The monotremes first appear in the fossiliferous rocks of the Triassic Age.

From the monotreme-like mammals developed the marsupial mammals, animals possessing a purse-like pouch on the after part of the abdomen, in which they carry their young. The young of marsupials are born in an extremely immature state, and are carried in this pouch in order to complete their development. The young of the kangaroo, an animal as large as a man, are only about an inch in length when they are born. They are carried for nine months after their birth in the marsupium of the mother, firmly attached to the maternal nipple. The marsupials came into existence during the Jurassic Age, and during the next age, the Cretaceous, they arose to considerable power. During this latter age they were found on every continent. But they have been almost exterminated by their more powerful descendants.

From the marsupials developed the placental mammals, animals so called because their young are developed within the parental body in association with a peculiar nourishing organ called the placenta. From the herbivorous marsupials developed the almost toothless edentates, the rodents, or gnawing animals, the sirenians, the cetaceans, and the hoofed animals, or ungulates. The sirenians are fish-like animals with two flippers, and are often called sea-cows. They resemble whales in many respects, and are sometimes classed with them. They are plant-eaters exclusively, and are found grazing along the bottoms of tropical estuaries and rivers. They have tiny eyes, teeth fitted for grinding (not spike-like as in the whales), and a strong affection for their young, the mother, when pursued, often carrying her little one under her flippers. An immense sirenian, known as Steller’s manatee, was discovered on the Behring Islands, along the Kamschatka coast, in 1741. Twenty-seven years afterwards not one of them was left, all having been murdered by the Russian sailors. The sirenians are probably degenerate forms of land quadrupeds, having lost their hind-limbs and developed the fish-like shape in adapting themselves to aquatic conditions. They appear first in the Eocene Age.

Among the most interesting derivatives of the herbivorous marsupials, because the most aberrant, are the whales. They are true mammals—have warm blood, breathe the air with lungs, and suckle their young like other mammals. But, like the sirenians, they live in the surface of the waters, and have flippers and a fish-like tail and form. They differ from the sirenians, however, in being carnivorous, in having inguinal instead of pectoral milk glands, and in being structurally less like quadrupeds. They probably degenerated from land quadrupeds during the Jurassic period, and, owing to their longer residence in the waters, have become further removed from the quadrupedal type than the sirenians. Whales have two limbs, the hind-limbs having disappeared as a result of the pre-eminent development of the tail. The tails of whales and sirenians are flattened horizontally, not vertically, as in fishes.

Out of generalised forms of hoofed animals now extinct developed the odd-toed and even-toed races of existing ungulates. The original ungulates had five hoofs on each foot, and were highly generalised in their structure. From these original five-toed forms have arisen the variously hoofed and variously structured tribes of existing ungulates: the five-toed elephant, the four-toed tapir and hippopotamus, the three-toed rhinoceros, the two-toed camel, sheep, swine, deer, antelope, giraffe, and ox, and the one-toed horse and zebra.

The carnivorous branch of the placental animals came from the carnivorous branch of the marsupials. From early forms of carnivorous placentals developed the ape-like lemurs and those generalised forms of rapacious animals from which arose the insect-eaters, the bats, and the true carnivora. The seals represent a by-development from the main line of the carnivora, a third defection, and a comparatively recent one, from land faunas. Seals live at the meeting of the land and the waters rather than in or on the waters, as do the cetaceans and sirenians. They have retained their fur and their four limbs, but have almost lost their power of land locomotion by the conversion of their feet into flippers. The two front-limbs of seals are the only ones used as ordinary limbs are used. The hind-limbs in most seals stretch permanently out behind, the webbed digits spreading out fan-shaped on either side of the stumpy tail, and constituting a rowing apparatus functionally homologous with the tail of fishes and whales. According to Jordan, the fur seals and the hair seals are descended from different families of land carnivora, the former probably from the bears, and the latter from the cats.

The lemurs are of especial interest to human beings, because in them are found the first startling approximation in looks and structure to the ‘human form divine.’ The lemurs are monkey-like creatures living in trees, but differ enough from true monkeys to be often placed in an order by themselves. Their milk glands are abdominal instead of pectoral, as in the monkeys, and the second digit of each hand and foot ends in a claw. The most of them live in Madagascar. They are generally nocturnal in their habits, although some species are diurnal. They appear first in the Eocene rocks, and Haeckel thinks they may have developed from opossum-like marsupials in the late Cretaceous or early Eocene Age.

From lemurs or from some other similar sort of semi-apes developed the true apes—the flat-nosed (platyrhine) apes of the New World and the narrow-nosed (catarhine) apes of the Old World. There is considerable difference between the New World apes and those of the Old World. The differences between the two classes is, in fact, so striking that they are thought by some to have developed independently of each other from distinct species of semi-apes. The apes of the New World have flat noses, and the nostrils are far apart and open in front of the nose, never below. The Old World apes have narrow noses, the nostrils being close together and opening downwards as in man. The tail of (nearly) all New World apes is prehensile, being used regularly as a fifth limb, while among Old World apes the tail is never so used. The Old World apes all have the same number and kinds of teeth as man has, while the New World apes (excepting the Brazilian marmosets) have an additional premolar in each half-jaw, making thirty-six in all. The catarhine apes are, therefore, structurally much nearer to man than their platyrhine cousins. All tailed apes probably sprang originally from a single stirp of semi-apes, and spread over the earth at a time when the eastern and western land masses of the southern hemisphere were connected with each other. The earliest remains of apes appear in the Miocene Age.

From the Old World tailed apes were developed the tailless, man-like, or anthropoid apes—the gorillas and chimpanzees of Africa, and the orangs and gibbons of Asia and the East Indies. The anthropoids arose from the tailed apes by the loss of the tail, the thinning of the hairy covering, the enlargement of the fore-brain, and by structural adaptations to a more nearly vertical position. No remains of anthropoids are found earlier than the Pliocene Age.

The man-like apes are the nearest living relatives of the human races. It is not probable that man has been derived directly from any of the existing races of man-like apes. For no one of them in all particulars of its structure stands closer to him than the rest. The orang approaches closest to man in the formation of the brain, the chimpanzee in the shape of the spine and in certain characteristics of the skull, the gorilla in the development of the feet and in size, and the gibbon in the formation of the throat and teeth. The earliest human races probably sprang from man-like races of apes now extinct, who lived in southern Asia or in Africa during the Pliocene Age (possibly as early as the Miocene), and who combined in their structures the various man-like characters possessed by existing anthropoids.

The earliest races of men were speechless—the ape-like ‘Alali’—beings, living wholly upon the ground and walking upon their hind-limbs, but without more than the mere rudiments of language. The vertical position led to a much greater development of the posterior parts, especially of the muscles of the back and the calves of the leg. The great toe, which in the ape is opposable, lost its opposability, or all except traces of it, after the abandonment of arboreal life. It must have been a sight fit to stir the soul of the most leathern, these children of the night, with low brows, stooping gait, and ape-like faces, armed with rude clubs, clothed in natural hair, and wandering about in droves without law, fire, or understanding, hiding in thickets and in the holes of the earth, feeding on roots and fruits, and contending doubtfully with the species around them for food and existence.

From the ‘Alali’—the speechless ape-men—we may imagine the true men to have evolved—talking men, men with erect posture and mature brain and larynx, the woolly-haired ulotrichi and the straight-haired lissotrichi. There are four existing species of woolly-haired men: the Papuans of New Guinea and Melanesia, and the Hottentots, Caffres, and Negroes of southern, equatorial, and north central Africa respectively. They all have long heads, slanting teeth, very dark skin, and black, bushy hair, each individual hair in cross-section being flat or oval in shape. In the straight-haired races the skin is much fairer than in the woolly-haired races, being seldom darker than brown, and each individual hair in cross-section is round like the cross-section of a cylinder. The principal species of straight-haired men are the sea-roving Malays of the East Indies and the Pacific, the round-faced Mongols of eastern and northern Asia, the aboriginal Americans of the western hemisphere, and the incomparable Aryans, including the ancient Greeks and Romans and the modern peoples of India, Persia, and Europe.

Man is to-day the pre-eminent animal of the planet. The successive ascendancies of the Worm, the Mollusk, the Crustacean, the Fish, the Reptile, and the Mammal, are followed triumphantly by the ascendancy of the Children of the Ape.

A large part of the life of the earth has remained steadfastly where it was cradled, beneath the waves. But more restless portions have left the sea and crept forth upon the land, or swarmed into the air. One migration, the most numerous, is represented by the insects. Another, the most enterprising, was the amphibian. After ages of evolution the amphibian branch divided. One branch acquired wings and sailed off into the air. The other divided and subdivided. One of these subdivisions entered the forests, climbed and clambered among the trees, acquired perpendicularity and hands, descended and walked upon the soil, invented agriculture, built cities and states, and imagined itself immortal. Human society is but the van—the hither terminus—of an evolutional process which had its beginning away back in the protoplasm of primeval waters. There is not a form that creeps beneath the sea but can claim kinship with the eagle. The philosopher is the remote posterity of the meek and lowly amoeba.

1. See ‘Genealogy of Animals,’ at the end of the chapter. 2. See table of geological ages, at the end of the previous chapter.

XI. Conclusion.

The resemblances, homologies, and metamorphoses existing everywhere among animal forms are, therefore, evidence of the most logical consanguinities. It is all so perfectly plain. The structures of organic beings have come about as a result of the action and reaction of environment upon these structures. Every being—and not only every being, but every species, the whole organic world—has come to be what it is as a result of the incessant hammerings of its surroundings, the hammerings not only of the present, but of the long-stretching past. By surroundings is meant, of course, the rest of the universe. Those animals belonging to the same stock resemble each other because they have been subjected to the same experiences, the same series of selections. They have lain on the same great anvil, and felt the down-comings of the same sledge. The similarities among animal forms in general indicate relationships, just as the similarities among the races of men indicate racial consanguinities. All men belong to the human species because they are all fundamentally alike. But there are differences in the character of the hair, in the colour of the skin, in the conformation of the skull, and in the structure of the language, among the different varieties of the species, indicating striking variety in relationship and origin. An eminent biologist has said that if Negroes and Caucasians were snails they would be classed as entirely distinct species of animals. Whether, as is thought by some, the woolly-haired races are the descendants of the African anthropoids, and the straight-haired varieties are the posterity of the orangs and gibbons, we may never know positively. But we do know that these two great branches of mankind must have different genealogies, extending to a remote antiquity, and that the varieties belonging to each great group sustain to each other the relations of a common kinship. Englishmen look like each other, act like each other, and speak the same language. So do Frenchmen and Swedes and Chinese. Every people is peculiar. This is not the result of accident or agreement, but the result of law. Mongolians do not all have short heads, yellow faces, slanting eyes, and prominent malars because they have agreed to have them, but as a result of a common pedigree. Similarity of structure implies commonalty of origin, and commonalty of origin means consanguinity.

And this is true whether you contemplate the featural resemblances of brothers and sisters of the same human parent, or those more fundamental characteristics which distinguish species, orders, and sub-kingdoms. All animals are composed of protoplasm, which is a compound of clay, because all animals are descended from the same first parents, protoplasmic organisms evolved out of the elemental ooze. All vertebrates have nerve-filled backbones with two pairs of ventrally branching limbs, because the original ancestors of the vertebrates had nerve-filled backbones with two pairs of ventrally branching limbs. Insects individually evolve from worms because worms are their phylogenetic fathers and mothers. Man has hands and a vertical spine, and walks on his hind-limbs, not because he was fashioned in the image of a god, but because his ancestors lived among the trees. The habit of using the posterior limbs for locomotion, and the anterior for prehension, and the resulting perpendicular, are peculiarities developed by our simian ancestors wholly on account of the incentives to such structure and posture afforded by aboreal life. These peculiarities would not likely have been acquired by quadrupeds living upon and taking their food from a perfectly level and treeless plain. If there had been no forests on the earth, therefore, there would have been no incentive to the perpendicular, and the ‘human form divine’ would have been inconceivably different from what it is to-day. And if fishes had had three serial pairs of limbs instead of two, and their posterity had inherited them, as they certainly would have had the foresight to do if they had had the opportunity, the highest animals on the earth to-day, the ‘paragons of creation,’ would probably be two-handed quadrupeds (centaurs) instead of two-handed bipeds. And much more efficient and ideal individuals they would have been in every way than the rickety, peculiar, unsubstantial plantigrades who, by their talent to talk, have become the masters of the universe, and, by their imaginations, ‘divine.’

Kinship is universal. The orders, families, species, and races of the animal kingdom are the branches of a gigantic arbour. Every individual is a cell, every species is a tissue, and every order is an organ in the great surging, suffering, palpitating process. Man is simply one portion of the immense enterprise. He is as veritably an animal as the insect that drinks its little fill from his veins, the ox he goads, or the wild-fox that flees before his bellowings. Man is not a god, nor in any imminent danger of becoming one. He is not a celestial star-babe dropped down among mundane matters for a time and endowed with wing possibilities and the anatomy of a deity. He is a mammal of the order of primates, not so lamentable when we think of the hyena and the serpent, but an exceedingly discouraging vertebrate compared with what he ought to be. He has come up from the worm and the quadruped. His relatives dwell on the prairies and in the fields, forests, and waves. He shares the honours and partakes of the infirmities of all his kindred. He walks on his hind-limbs like the ape; he eats herbage and suckles his young like the ox; he slays his fellows and fills himself with their blood like the crocodile and the tiger; he grows old and dies, and turns to banqueting worms, like all that come from the elemental loins. He cannot exceed the winds like the hound, nor dissolve his image in the mid-day blue like the eagle. He has not the courage of the gorilla, the magnificence of the steed, nor the plaintive innocence of the ring-dove. Poor, pitiful, glory-hunting hideful! Born into a universe which he creates when he comes into it, and clinging, like all his kindred, to a clod that knows him not, he drives on in the preposterous storm of the atoms, as helpless to fashion his fate as the sleet that pelts him, and lost absolutely in the somnambulism of his own being.

THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP

I. The Conflict of Science and Tradition II. Evidences of Psychical Evolution III. The Common-sense View IV. The Elements of Human and Non-human Mind Compared V. Conclusion

‘I saw, deep in the eyes of the animals, the human soul look out upon me.’ ‘I saw where it was born down deep under feathers and fur, or condemned for awhile to roam four-footed among the brambles. I caught the clinging mute glance of the prisoner, and swore that I would be faithful.’ ‘Thee, my brother and sister, I see and mistake not. Do not be afraid. Dwelling thus and thus for awhile, fulfilling thy appointed time—thou too shalt come to thyself at last.’ ‘Thy half-warm horns and long tongue lapping round my wrist do not conceal thy humanity any more than the learned talk of the pedant conceals his—for all thou art dumb we have words and plenty between us.’

— Edward Carpenter.

THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP

I. The Conflict of Science and Tradition.