Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 21.djvu/42

34 held to surpass them in the exquisite perfection of their physical structure, while the flexible trunk of the elephant, combined with his vast strength and admirable sagacity, would probably gain for him the first rank in the animal creation.

But if this would have been a true estimate, the mere fact that the ape is our nearest relation does not necessarily oblige us to come to any other conclusion. Man is undoubtedly the most perfect of all animals, but he is so solely in respect of characters in which he differs from all the monkey-tribe—the easily erect posture, the perfect freedom of the hands from all part in locomotion, the large size and complete opposability of the thumb, and the well-developed brain, which enables him fully to utilize these combined physical advantages. The monkeys have none of these, and without them the amount of resemblance they have to us is no advantage, and confers no rank. We are biased by the too exclusive consideration of the man-like apes. If these did not exist, the remaining monkeys could not be thereby deteriorated as to their organization or lowered in their zoölogical position; but it is doubtful if we should then class them so high as we now do. We might then dwell more on their resemblances to lower types—to rodents, to insectivora, and to marsupials, and should hardly rank the hideous baboon above the graceful leopard or stately stag. The true conclusion appears to be, that the combination of external characters and internal structure which exists in the monkeys is that which, when greatly improved, refined, and beautified, was best calculated to become the perfect instrument of the human intellect, and to aid in the development of man's higher nature; while, on the other hand, in the rude, inharmonious, and undeveloped state which it has reached in the quadrumana, it is by no means worthy of the highest place, or can be held to exhibit the most perfect development of existing animal life.—Contemporary Review.



N the fifth century before Christ, Democritus declared that the senses of sight, hearing, smell, and taste were merely modifications of the sense of touch. Aristotle ridiculed his theory, and so, stamped with his disapproval, it lay untouched for two thousand years, until Telesius, an Italian of the sixteenth century, revived it.

Strange to say, all that modern science has accomplished in embryology and zoölogy tends to confirm this theory of Democritus, that these four senses are only specializations of the universal sense—the sense of touch. In the embryo of all animals the organs of these four senses first appear as infoldings of the outer germinal layer, the 