Evening Republican, Volume 59, Number 92, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 May 1917 — NOT NOBLE ANIMAL [ARTICLE]

NOT NOBLE ANIMAL

Man Not Such Finished as Imagined, Says Savant Human Body Has Points lof Decided Inferiority to Despised Mammals, -It Is Asserted. Investigation is proving, declarer Dr. F. Wood Jones, professor anatomy at the university of London, in his new book, “Arboreal Man,” that the human body is no such finished product of evolution as we have fondly imagined. It has points of decided inferiority to the physical frames of mammals upon which we look with disdain as less finely formed than ourselves. Some of the lower animals are more capable of exquisite adaptations than are we ourselves. Their bodies are more splendid instruments than ours are, more complex, indicative of a higher stage of evolution on the physi cal plane. The upright attitude of man has been employed as an argument in favor of his superiority to the fourfooted beast physiologically, although the evidence makes such an argument ridiculous. It would tend the other way, says a review in the London Lancet. If we compare man’s body with the body of so-called "lower organisms” we are astonished to find that his points of resemblance are with the lowest in the scale of conscious being. Man is oddly unlike the noble beasts of the jungle; but he is amazingly like the creatures of a primitive type that infest the bog, the pond and the swamp. His relatives are not the lords of the forest, not the kings of the jungle, nor the mighty eagle, but the creatures of 'the slime. How is it that the various elements of the remote ancestral limb have been preserved in human limbs? Professor Jones’ answer is that the primates broke away from the early land living mammalian stock while the primitive bones and muscles were still preserved in that stock. These primitive elements proved useful and were preserved in that particular form which adopted an arboreal life and used the hand and foot to grasp with. The primitive plan on which the hands of man are built can be accounted for only by supposing that man’s ancestry spent a tong pilgrimage In the trees. It was during man’s arboreal phase of existence tfiat the vast majority of those anatomical .characters which we regard as adaptations to man’s upright posture were evolved. These anatomical traits indicate how low we are.— Current Opinion.