John Arthur Thomson

“ Given over to fearful crime and passion, plunged in the blackest ignorance, preyed upon by hideous and grotesque delusions, yet steadfastly serving the profoundest of ideals in their fixed faith that existence in any form is better than non-existence, they ever rescued triumphantly from the jaws of ever imminent destruction the torch of life which, thanks to them, now lights the world for us. ”

“ All through the ages necessity has been the mother of invention and curiosity its father; but perhaps we miss the heart of the matter if we forget the importance of some leisure time--wherein to observe and think. ”

“ As Professor Flinders Petrie has said, the only meaning the term "race" now can have is that of a group of human beings whose type has been unified by their rate of assimilation exceeding the rate of change produced by the infiltration of foreign elements. It is probable, however, that the progress of precise anthropology will make it possible to distinguish the various racial "strains" that make up any people. For the human sense of race is so strong that it convinces us of reality even when scientific definition is impossible. ”

“ Bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, are these half-brutish prehistoric brothers. Girdled about with the immense darkness of this mysterious universe even as we are, they were born and died, suffered and struggled. ”

“ We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his God-like intellect, which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system--with all these exalted powers--man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin. We should be clear that this view does not say more than that man sprang from a stock common to him and to the higher apes. ”

“ When the original peculiarities, say, of negro and Mongol, Australian and Caucasian, arose as brusque variations or "mutations," then they would have great staying power from generation to generation. They would not be readily swamped by intercrossing or averaged off. Peculiarities and changes of climate and surroundings, not to speak of other change-producing factors, would provoke new departures from age to age, and so fresh racial ventures were made. Moreover, the occurrence of out-breeding when two races met, in peace or in war, would certainly serve to induce fresh starts. ”

“ There is nothing like this in the non-living world. But to return to the developing human embryo, there is formed from and above the embryonic food-canal a skeletal rod, which is called the notochord. It thrills the imagination to learn that this is the only supporting axis that the lower orders of the backboned race possess. The curious thing is that it does not become the backbone, which is certainly one of the essential features of the vertebrate race. ”

“ Although our knowledge of the human brain is limited--there are large areas to which we can assign no definite function--we may rest assured that a brain which was shaped in a mould so similar to our own was one which responded to the outside world as ours does. Piltdown man saw, heard, felt, thought, and dreamt much as we do still. ”

“ The point is that in the making of the organs of the body, say brain and kidneys, the embryo of man pursues a path closely corresponding to the path followed by the embryos of other backboned animals lower in the scale, but at successive stages it parts company with these, with the lowest first and so on in succession. A human embryo is never like a little reptile, but the developing organs pass through stages which very closely resemble the corresponding stages in lower types which are in a general way ancestral. ”

“ Stages in the development of the body during its nine months of ante-natal life are closely similar to stages in the development of the anthropoid embryo. Babies born in times of famine or siege are sometimes, as it were, imperfectly finished, and sometimes have what may be described as monkeyish features and ways. A visit to an institution for the care of children who show arrested, defective, or disturbed development leaves one sadly impressed with the risk of slipping down the rungs of the steep ladder of evolution ”

“ So in the development of the human embryo, while there are close resemblances to the embryos of apes, monkeys, other mammals, and even, at earlier stages still, to the embryos of reptile and fish, it has to be admitted that we are dealing from first to last with a human embryo with peculiarities of its own. ”

“ As to FOLK, human progress depends on intrinsic racial qualities--notably health and vigour of body, clearness and alertness of mind, and an indispensable sociality. The most powerful factors in the world are clear ideas in the minds of energetic men of good will. The differences in bodily and mental health which mark races, and stocks within a people, just as they mark individuals, are themselves traceable back to germinal variations or mutations, and to the kind of sifting to which the race or stock has been subjected. ”

“ Man alone is thoroughly erect after his infancy is past; his head weighted with the heavy brain does not droop forward as the ape's does; with his erect attitude there is perhaps to be associated his more highly developed vocal organs. Compared with an anthropoid ape, man has a bigger and more upright forehead, a less protrusive face region, smaller cheek-bones and eyebrow ridges, and more uniform teeth. He is almost unique in having a chin. Man plants the sole of his foot flat on the ground, his big toe is usually in a line with the other toes, and he has a better heel than any monkey has. ”

“ Steps in Human Evolution
Real men arose, we believe, by variational uplifts of considerable magnitude which led to big and complex brains and to the power of reasoned discourse. In some other lines of mammalian evolution there were from time to time great advances in the size and complexity of the brain, as is clear, for instance, in the case of horses and elephants. The same is true of birds as compared with reptiles, and everyone recognises the high level of excellence that has been attained by their vocal powers. ”

“ The average human brain weighs about 48 ounces; the gorilla brain does not exceed 20 ounces at its best. The capacity of the human skull is never less than 55 cubic inches; in the orang and the chimpanzee the figures are 26 and 27-1/2 respectively. We are not suggesting that the most distinctive features of man are such as can be measured and weighed, but it is important to notice that the main seat of his mental powers is physically far ahead of that of the highest of the anthropoid apes. ”

“ We cannot, however, say more than that the factors of human progress have always had these three aspects, Folk, Place, Work, and that if progress is to continue on stable lines it must always recognise the essential correlation of fitter folk in body and mind: improved habits and functions, alike in work and leisure ”

“ Without committing ourselves to a belief in the entire uselessness of the vermiform appendix, which grows out as a blind alley at the junction of the small intestine with the large, we are safe in saying that it is a dwindling structure--the remains of a blind gut which must have been capacious and useful in ancestral forms. ”

“ Anatomical Proof of Man's Relationship with a Simian Stock
The anatomical structure of man is closely similar to that of the anthropoid apes--the gorilla, the orang, the chimpanzee, and the gibbon. Bone for bone, muscle for muscle, blood-vessel for blood-vessel, nerve for nerve, man and ape agree. As the conservative anatomist, Sir Richard Owen, said, there is between them "an all-pervading similitude of structure." Differences, of course, there are, but they are not momentous except man's big brain, which may be three times as heavy as that of a gorilla. ”

“ It may be urged that we are attaching too much importance to the arboreal apprenticeship, since many tree-loving animals remain to-day very innocent creatures. To this reasonable objection there are two answers, first that in its many acquisitions the arboreal evolution of the _humanoid_ precursors of man prepared the way for the survival of a _human_ type marked by a great step in brain-development; and second that the passage from the humanoid to the human was probably associated with _a return to mother earth_. ”

“ The probability is that after their decline Europe was repeopled by immigrants from Asia. It cannot be said that there is any inherent biological necessity for the decline of a vigorous race--many animal races go back for millions of years--but in mankind the historical fact is that a period of great racial vigour and success is often followed by a period of decline, sometimes leading to practical disappearance as a definite race. ”

“ With all his faults he has his ethical face set in the right direction. The main line of movement is towards the fuller embodiment of the true, the beautiful, and the good in healthy lives which are increasingly a satisfaction in themselves. ”

“ The vestigial third eyelid in man is enough of itself to prove his relationship with the mammals, but it is only one example out of many. Some of these are discussed in the article dealing with the human body, but we may mention the vestigial muscles going to the ear-trumpet, man's dwindling counterpart of the skin-twitching muscle which we see a horse use when he jerks a fly off his flanks, and the short tail which in the seven-weeks-old human embryo is actually longer than the leg. ”

“ Monkeys may be infected with certain microbes to which man is peculiarly liable, such as the bacillus of tuberculosis. Darwin showed that various human gestures and facial expressions have their counterparts in monkeys. The sneering curl of the upper lip, which tends to expose the canine tooth, is a case in point, though it may be seen in many other mammals besides monkeys--in dogs, for instance, which are at some considerable distance from the simian branch to which man's ancestors belonged. ”

“ Perhaps the absence of great physical strength prompted reliance on wits; the prolongation of infancy would help to educate the parents in gentleness; the strengthening of the feeling of kinship would favour the evolution of family and social life--of which there are many anticipations at lower levels. ”

“ Moreover, even when abundant material resources are present, they will not make for much progress unless the climate is such that they can be readily utilised. Indeed, climate has been one of the great factors in civilisation, here stimulating and there depressing energy, in one place favouring certain plants and animals important to man, in another place preventing their presence. Moreover, climate has slowly changed from age to age.
As to WORK, the form of a civilisation is in some measure dependent on the primary occupations, whether hunting or fishing, farming or shepherding ”

“ It is a plausible view that the transition from the humanoid to the human was effected by a discontinuous variation of considerable magnitude, what is nowadays called a _mutation_, and that it had mainly to do with the brain and the vocal organs. But given the gains of the arboreal apprenticeship, the stimulus of an enforced descent to terra firma, and an evolving brain and voice, we can recognise accessory factors which helped success to succeed. ”

“ But the evolution of a free hand made it possible to dispense with protrusive lips and gripping teeth. Thus began the recession of the snout region, the associated enlargement of the brain-box, and the bringing of the eyes to the front. The overcrowding of the teeth that followed the shortening of the snout was one of the taxes on progress of which modern man is often reminded in his dental troubles. ”

“ Much has followed from man's "handiness."
The arboreal life had many other consequences. It led to an increased freedom of movement of the thigh on the hip joint, to muscular arrangements for balancing the body on the leg, to making the backbone a supple yet stable curved pillar, to a strongly developed collar-bone which is only found well-formed when the fore-limb is used for more than support, and to a power of "opposing" the thumb and the big toe to the other digits of the hand and foot--an obvious advantage for branch-gripping. ”

“ It must be noticed that there are two serious errors in the careless statement often made that man in his development is at one time like a little fish, at a later stage like a little reptile, at a later stage like a little primitive mammal, and eventually like a little monkey. ”

“ Palaeolithic men were involved in the succession of four Great Ice Ages or Glaciations, and it may be that the human race owes much to the alternation of hard times and easy times--glacial and interglacial. ”

“ We must not think of an Aristotle or a Newton except as fine results which justify all the groaning and travailing; we must think of average men, of primitive peoples to-day, and of our forbears long ago. We must remember how much of man's advance is dependent on the external registration of the social heritage, not on the slowly changing natural inheritance. ”