Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/700

680 necks and breasts of the mothers, holding on by the long hair of their shoulders and sides. This was the case with a young Rhoesus monkey born in the Zöological Gardens. Wallace, in his Malay Archipelago, gives an account of a very young orang which he secured after shooting the mother. He states that the baby orang was in most points as helpless as a human infant, and lay on its back, quite unable to sit upright. It had, however, an extraordinary power of grip, and when it had once secured a hold -of his beard he was not able to free himself without help. On his taking it home to his house in Sarawak he found that it was very unhappy unless it could seize and hold on to something, and would lie on its back and sprawl about with its limbs until this could be accomplished. He first gave it some bars of wood to hold on to, but, finding it preferred something hairy, he rolled up a buffalo skin, and for a while the little creature was content to cling to this, until, by trying to make it perform other maternal duties and fill an empty stomach, the poor orphan mias nearly choked itself with mouthfuls of hair and had to be deprived of its comforter. The whole story of this poor little ape is both amusing and pathetic, as well as instructive, and I can not do better than refer those not already acquainted with it to the book, which is as a whole as good an introduction for the young student to the science of evolution as could well be found.

This power to hold on to the parent in any emergency may be compared to the galloping power of the young foal and the instinct of concealment in the calf; it is the one chief means of self-preservation adopted by the young of the arboreal quadrumana. During long epochs, impossible to measure by years, it would constantly be exercised; and it is plain that every infant ape that failed to exercise it, or which was physically unable from any cause to cling to its mother, when pursued by an agile foe, would either fall to the ground or be devoured among the branches. When we consider the harassed and precarious life of all wild creatures and the number of their enemies, it becomes apparent that scarcely an individual would be exempt from being many times put to the test, and the habit would, by the survival of those only which were able to maintain their grip, become more and more confirmed, until it became an integral part of the nature of all quadrumana and their descendants.

This being so, it occurred to me to investigate the powers of grip in young infants; for if no such power were present, or if the grasp of the hands proved only to be equally proportionate to any other exhibition of muscular strength in those feeble folk, it would either indicate that our connection with quadrumana was of the slightest and most remote description, or that man had some other origin than the Darwinian philosophy maintains.