Page:Natural History Review (1862).djvu/14

Rh Commencing with the well-known aphoristic summation of the characters of man—situs erectus, manus duæ, pedes bini, M. St. Hilaire proceeds to inquire whether these characters are truly distinctive of Man—being found in him only among animals.

With regard to the erect position, the reply is, that though some other animals, like the Penguins, have a true and habitual situs erectus, they differ widely in their organisation from man, while the creatures which approach him most nearly, never constantly and habitually maintain themselves in the erect posture: the natural attitude of the anthropoid ape being neither the vertical position of man, nor the horizontal posture of the lower quadrupeds, but an intermediate or oblique, attitude. The situs erectus then, and its correlative character, the natural 'heavenward,' or rather 'horizon-ward,' glance, stand good as distinctive peculiarities of man; the oblique pose of the anthropoid ape furnishing the half-way step from man to the quadruped.

The other two characters manus duæ, pedes bini, do not stand criticism so well. Before we can accept the diagnosis, that man has two hands and two feet, while apes have four hands, we must ask to have the difference between hands and feet clearly defined, and, as M. St Hilaire remarks, this is by no means so easy a matter as it seems.

Cuvier defines the essence of a hand to be "faculté d'opposer le pouce aux autres doigts pour saisir les plus petites choses;" but if we accept this definition, then, as M. St. Hilaire and Mr. Ogilby long ago showed, one-half of the so-called Quadrumana are Bimana—for none of the American apes have anterior members with opposable thumbs, and the Marmosets have the digit which represents the thumb in the fore limbs, as like the others, as it is in a cat; while Galeopithecus has no opposable digit either on the anterior, or on the posterior, limbs.

M. St Hilaire perceiving the difficulty in the way of the Cuverian definition, and giving up the opposable thumb, proposes the following new one (p. 199), "La main est une extrémité pourvue de doigts allongés, profondément divisés, trés mobiles, trés flexibles, et par suite susceptibles de saisir, au moins par l'opposition des doigts à la paume," and premising this conception of a hand, maintains, that all the apes are quadrumanous. But it appears to us that this definition is as little capable of withstanding criticism as that which it is meant to supplant.

When uncramped by the use of shoes, the toes of a man's foot are separated from one another for a distance, equal to fully one-fifth of the total length of the foot, and they are, as M. St. Hilaire admits, and as everybody who has lived on board ship, or has seen savages, is aware, very moveable, very flexible, and capable of prehension by opposition, not only of the toes to the sole, but of the great toe to the second. In proof of the latter qualities of the human foot, our author cites the boatmen of Ka-ching in China; the weavers of Senegal; the Brazilian horsemen, who put their feet to the same