Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 4 (1900).djvu/272

244 enough was derived by ourselves from an Ape-like ancestor."

The keepers of the Zoological Gardens having informed Darwin that Monkeys attack each other by the throat, Mr. Cunningham thinks it "not impossible that the growth of the beard was originally excited by the stimulus caused by such attacks, the hair of the throat and around the mouth being regularly moved and pulled by the adversary's jaws and teeth, or perhaps by the hands." That the true cause of the loss of hair on the evolved human body "was the wearing of clothes," will perhaps require more support from anthropological facts than is certainly at present obtainable. Starting from the fact that irritation of a bone by blows will cause exostosis, the assumption is considered "probable that the growth of the antlers was caused originally by the ancestral stags butting their heads together, and so irritating the frontal bone." The comb and wattle of the Cock, Gallus bankiva, may owe its original stimulation to the "pecking by the beaks of other birds"; while the fleshy caruncle of the Turkey Cock is ascribed to a similar origin.

These extracts will suffice to show the line of argument used to support this theory; and our object being rather to "notice" new books than to criticise new views, we think we have fairly focussed attention to this return from Darwin to Lamarck. The central idea or argument is carried through the principal zoological phyla, and to support it many interesting and little-known facts are adduced, which will interest and instruct, though perhaps not always convert the reader.

If a second edition should appear, it will be well to revise some personal names. On one page we read—Mr. Roland Trimen, on the next he is Sir Roland Trimen; Mr. Cronwright Schreiner has certainly changed his name, but has not yet called himself "Conrad"; and the late Alfred Tylor did not spell his name "Tyler." These are small matters, but Mr. Cunningham will doubtless be glad to rectify them.

has long been recognized as a progressive science—and it is. In 1859 Darwin did not introduce the doctrine of