take, the comparison of their modifications in the
series of apes leads to the same result: that
the anatomic differences that separate man from the
gorilla and chimpanzee are not as great as those that
separate the gorilla from the lower apes.”
Translated into phylogenetic language, this “pithecometra-law,”
formulated in such masterly fashion by Huxley, is quite
equivalent to the popular saying: “Man
is descended from the apes.”
(Figure 2.277. The drill-baboon (Cynocephalus
leucophaeus) (From Brehm.))
In the very first exposition of his profound natural
classification (1735) Linne placed the anthropoid
mammals at the head of the animal kingdom, with three
genera: man, the ape, and the sloth. He afterwards
called them the “Primates”—the
“lords” of the animal world; he then also
separated the lemur from the true ape, and rejected
the sloth. Later zoologists divided the order
of Primates. First the Gottingen anatomist, Blumenbach,
founded a special order for man, which he called Bimana
("two-handed"); in a second order he united the apes
and lemurs under the name of Quadrumana ("four-handed");
and a third order was formed of the distantly-related
Chiroptera (bats, etc.). The separation
of the Bimana and Quadrumana was retained by Cuvier
and most of the subsequent zoologists. It seems
to be extremely important, but, as a matter of fact,
it is totally wrong. This was first shown in
1863 by Huxley, in his famous Man’s Place in
Nature. On the strength of careful comparative
anatomical research he proved that the apes are just
as truly “two-handed” as man; or, if we
prefer to reverse it, that man is as truly four-handed
as the ape. He showed convincingly that the ideas
of hand and foot had been wrongly defined, and had
been improperly based on physiological instead of
morphological grounds. The circumstance that
we oppose the thumb to the other four fingers in our
hand, and so can grasp things, seemed to be a special
distinction of the hand in contrast to the foot, in
which the corresponding great toe cannot be opposed
in this way to the others. But the apes can grasp
with the hind-foot as well as the fore, and so were
regarded as quadrumanous. However, the inability
to grasp that we find in the foot of civilised man
is a consequence of the habit of clothing it with
tight coverings for thousands of years. Many of
the bare-footed lower races of men, especially among
the negroes, use the foot very freely in the same
way as the hand. As a result of early habit and
continued practice, they can grasp with the foot (in
climbing trees, for instance) just as well as with
the hand. Even new-born infants of our own race
can grasp very strongly with the great toe, and hold
a spoon with it as firmly as with the hand. Hence
the physiological distinction between hand and foot
can neither be pressed very far, nor has it a scientific
basis. We must look to morphological characters.
