Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/104

94 indeed molt invisibly, are continuously shedding our scales, but there are some animals that get through this process even more quickly than do birds, as, for instance, the shedding of the skin as a whole by the newt, eft, and snake.

Sir James Paget has noted that some people have a few extra long hairs growing out from the general mass of the eyebrows. These few long hairs are representatives of a permanent condition in the chimpanzee and some baboons. they grow out separately from the general hairy mass over the superciliary ridges.

Darwin notes as a significant fact that the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet of man are quite naked of hairs, like the inferior surfaces of all four extremities in most of the lower animals.

Something about the ear. The lobule of the ear is peculiar to man: there is, however, a rudiment of it in the gorilla. Happy gorilla—and man!

About the brain of man and apes. The whole comparison is one of degree, and in the case of the Bushman's brain with that of a well-developed ape, the comparison becomes nearly equal. Richard Owen once claimed that the hippocampus minor, a trifling portion of the interior of the brain, was the only exclusively characteristic human part, but it has since been demonstrated in the orang and chimpanzee. In truth there are no specific distinctions between the brain of the ape and that of man! I possess in pickle the brain of a monkey; I am sure that my own brain is of much greater proportional weight and complexity. It is a pleasing reflection!

To turn to a totally different class of analogies, picking them out and noting them from the thousands of examples in the world of manners, thoughts, and ideas. The effects of civilization and town life upon man and some of the lower creation is very well exemplified by the town sparrow being seldom caught by a cat or slain by a missile, while the bumpkin bird is easily overtaken by the one or the other. Experientia docet—at one time the gulls of the Serpentine used to slay the sparrows; they knew not their enemy, but with each new generation of their victims the gulls had fewer meal. Instinct has been described as the accumulated experience of the race. We have had a good example of it here; that it is common enough among the different races of mankind and the various animals of the creation goes without saying, and Dr. Taylor nearly, proves that it exists among plants.

Parents watching the characters of their children observe that at one time the traits of the mother are to the fore, and that at another period of the child's existence he or she shows the chips