Walter Kidd

“ I have never had social intercourse with a loris, but I have shaken the friendly little hand of a chimpanzee with a combina­tion of pleasure, mild shock and perhaps memories of my own palms in the more nervous moments of early life. It is a strange, cool, soft and damp surface, but the sensation conveyed by the skin of a loris lately dead show that in life it is a wonderfully sensitive and tender structure. The whole of the palm and sole is covered with well-developed patterns of papillary ridges especially on the palmar and plantar pads. ”

“ It is matter of common knowledge that not only on the palm and sole of man, but on regions where the skin is not specialised in that remarkable manner that is found in those regions, but also in others, that increased pressure and friction will very soon cause a harder and thicker growth of epidermis, as on the skin over a projecting bone in club-foot, over the shoulder where a weight is constantly carried, on the knuckles of many manual workers, and over the patellæ of a devout Roman Catholic, as I have often seen. ”

“ And I submit that the presence of it in this region in this animal is a stamp of his persistently ferocious nature, as much as the various peculiarities of arrangement of hair on man’s eyebrows in a previous chapter are of the mental and moral habits of the individual man. As rulers of old used, in their genial fashion, to brand a supposed or actual criminal on his shoulder or forehead, so is the lion branded with an hereditary mark of his nature and the past life of himself and his ancestors. ”

“ There are no such phenomena in total experience as unit-characters of allied forms, small variations are the rule. Without doubt a large propor­tion of the stimuli received by an organism are as figures written on a slate and at once wiped off. They are as the snows of yester year. The most they do is to contribute in their measure to the metabolism of the organism, being too numerous and minute to affect any structural change. In a higher form of life none but those which are frequently repeated in the individual and in succeeding generations can effect any structural response. ”

“ Professor Sherrington remarks on the first page of his well known work, in reference to the cell-theory, “with the progress of natural knowledge, biology has passed beyond the confines of the study of merely visible form, and is turning more and more to the subtle and deeper sciences that are branches of energetics. The cell-theory and the doctrine of evolution find their scope more and more, therefore, in the problems of function, and have become more and more identified with the aim and incorporated among the methods of physiology.” ”

“ Nothing less than such a “claim” was understood by the ancients, and, though metaphysics had to supply the lack of anatomy and physiology, it has always been held that mind was lord of matter, and now scientific research has told us why. But no one, even the most hard-shelled scholastic, can refuse to the brain organ its predominant share in the making of man. This is seen even in the frigid sphere of science by the difference of interest there is shown between any great discovery bearing on the evolution of man, or on some new lower animal form. ”

“ But as the days of authority are in a certain sense gone for ever, and we live under the reign of experiment, research and questioning, every biologist, within certain limits, does what is right in his own eyes; there is no King in these days.
Skeletal muscles are structures in which, if ever, the factors of use and habit and disuse would be shown, because muscle is a tissue, with highly active metabolism, so that it has been called “an expensive tissue” for the animal to maintain. ”

“ In spite of the satires of Swift we may not cavil at the natural pride which has led man, Homo Sapiens, as he also calls himself, to confer boldly on himself, and his lineal ancestors at any rate, the name of Primates. This large and highest group of hair-clad mammals includes broadly and somewhat loosely lemurs, monkeys, apes and man. The last has not lost his hairy endowment, though it is sadly curtailed, and it is well to remember that, except on the palms of the hands, the soles of the feet and the terminal rows of phalanges of fingers and toes, man is a hair-clad mammal. ”

“ In a world teeming with the life of plants and animals, and in the branch of science which seeks to interpret them, where we enter upon the unknown much sooner than in any other sphere of science, Weismann has set out to prove or maintain the most stupendous negative ever framed by the human mind. ”

“ It is in this final stage where the triumphs of selection have been won, and where their undeniable value and interest has led some exponents of the distributional laws of genetics to disregard, or accept as data, the early and formative stages. Theirs is a mental state which resembles that of Darwin, who, for once in a moment of haste, declared the question of the origin of life to be rubbish. ”

“ We are so familiar with the thickening of the skin on the hands of manual workers and on the feet of those who walk much, to say nothing of what we call a “corn,” from pressure of tight boots, that we are in danger of forgetting that the protecting skin over the hands and feet of animals was of necessity adjusted in a crude way to the measure and kind of walking in past ages and in all levels of life, and that it is maintained in that adjusted condition by the use, or disuse, of each life. ”

“ This is never the fate of such as Pithecanthropus or Eoanthropus dawsoni, or of the more recent genealogical theory and researches as to arboreal man. The call of these studies of man’s evolution is felt by all, and the difference in the two branches of biology may account for what must have struck many others, that is the neglect of adding the blue ribbon of science to the honours of the discoverer of the Okapi. ”

“ But a great deal more of movement of the head and neck is observed beside the jolt at every step. See how the animal tosses up its head, twists it to this and that side for the mere joie de vivre when it is fresh, or, even when hindered by blinkers,47 how he turns his head to look at every passing object in the road with his ancestral caution, how he will pass contemptuously a great horse-waggon or even now a villainous-looking motor lorry, but will peer at a beggar woman sitting beside the road, or a heap of stones, or a yapping cur! ”

“ In strict logic, according to what we all now believe, there is no possible norm. All that one may do is to take stock at a certain epoch of evolution and label, for our own convenience, some group, or organism or structure as “normal”—and go on with our business, collecting some specimens, calling them type-specimens, and putting them in books or cases in the Natural History Museum—and then proceed to business. ”

“ We may present all these to the Pan-Selectionist, but inasmuch as the short, bristling hairs on the back of a lion are on the one hand hidden by the mane from an animal in front, and on the other are so small as to be seen quite close if at all, the survival-value of the reversed pattern of hair in question is quite outside the province of selection. It is so manifestly under the control of cerebral action, that it may be compared, as an undesigned experiment, with that of man in placing harness upon a horse, as to the power of cerebral action in producing structure. ”

“ So that man’s place in Nature is nearly synonymous with the structural evolution of his brain, as Huxley has shown in his clear and simple manner. Even if man is to remain still an animal Melchisedec for generations to come, or to put it lower, a foundling, no future discoveries that can be imagined will disprove Huxley’s declara­tion, “Evolution is no longer an hypothesis, but an historical fact.” ”

“ The fact is that we do not inherit habits or associations as such at all, but the neurones of the grey matter in spine and brain which subserve, direct and control them. Though a fresh neurone or two in the brain of an early ungulate deliberating, so to speak, as to the life he shall take up, whether that of oxen or horses, may be trifling in itself as to immediate value to the animal, it may be to him as much a matter of fate to acquire those microscopic cells as it was to the undifferentiated organism that paused before it sealed its fate as plant. ”

“ No hair-clad mammal either within the family of the Equidæ, or without, has any other arrangement on the under surface of its neck than what is here shown to be the normal one—a uniform uninterrupted slope from the head to the chest. There is also a feature of this greatly variegated piece of the horse’s coat under its neck, and that is that it is so highly variegated with diversity of pattern as to make it unlike any normal or natural structure or character in any animal. That is not the way Nature does her normal work. ”

“ Among Felidæ one cannot unfortunately choose the harmless necessary cat of tiles, areas, firesides and ladies’ laps, to say nothing of those lovers of cats like Huxley who would never eject his cat from his armchair if she had been there before him. It is true that we know much of her daily and nightly mode of life—many of us too much—and in that respect one could set to work with confidence in interpreting her hair patterns, but on account of her long and thick coat we can only speculate what patterns or innovations of her family uniform she might have devised ”

“ It is not for nothing that Nature has provided every tiny hair of the mammalian skin with that insignificant little band of muscle which lies within the hair-pit, and is attached to the sloping hair on its posterior side, and thus when it contracts serves to drag it into an erect position. I refrain from discussing what may be held to be the survival value, under the theory of selection, of this power of the arrectores pili to confer on the possessor an added appearance of ferocity and general frightfulness. This is quite a likely explana­tion of the presence of these little muscles. ”

“ In matters of thought and inquiry it is useless to retreat within a stronghold and bar the gates. It may be satisfactory to himself for one Milner to write a book on behalf of a certain body of doctrine and call it The End of Controversy, but the book should have held the sub-title The End of Progress. The Newtons, Pasteurs and Darwins have seldom wielded the weapon of controversy, though the triumph of The Origin of Species would have been slower without the aid of Darwin’s brilliant champion and candid friend. ”

“ Direct evidence of the founda­tion of new reflex-arcs and their organiza­tion is of course small. The conditions, such as the duration of human life, preclude any extensive formation under experiment of new reflex-arcs, but enough is known to enable one to follow the backward way with some confidence. As to the inheritance of these, the evidence rests on opinion and tremendous probability, but as the only problem with which I am concerned here is that of initiative I think it better to leave the matter of transmission to a dispassionate considera­tion of the probability of its occurrence. ”

“ If we examine the muscles which, rising from the front of the leg, cross the ankle-joint to end on the back of the foot on the toes of fifty men, we shall find every stage in the evolution of this muscle. In one man at least it will be undeveloped; in two or perhaps three it will be represented by a part of the tendon of the extensor muscle of the little toe, which in place of ending entirely on the toe sends a part to end on the metatarsal bone of the little toe. ”

“ The statement of Weismann, “Everything is adapted in animated nature” was necessary to his theory of germinal selection, but it admits of extensive and numerous exceptions in view of the fact that so much of adapta­tion is partial and imperfect. If he had said that every organism as a being is adapted he would have been nearer the truth, but that every tissue and part of an organism is adapted is demonstrably untrue. A large number of organisms, themselves apparently well adapted, flourish well enough and reproduce their kind in spite of faulty and rudimentary tissues and parts. ”

“ If an ape can express a good many of the coarser emotions of an animal by the action of its facial muscles, and through kindness and training exhibit some of the finer ones, there is a wide distance between this level of attainment and the multiplied moods and unnumbered varieties of expression which give to the human face its unique charm. ”

“ There is evidence in the above account of the muscle that a structure is found in monkeys and man which might operate on the overlying streams of hair in any of these animal forms—or might not—in accordance with the concep­tion of struggle between opposing forces which I have kept in view all through this volume.
It is evident that in all animals below man the platysma has not achieved any victory by its action over the streams of hair on the chest and neck, and to my mind it is equally evident that in the case of man it has carried through a very manifest “turning-movement.” ”

“ The scratch-reflex in the dog, which like the tendon-reflex in man was in my youth a subject for schoolboy tricks, has received a vast amount of attention and research from physiologists to whom it has brought valuable fruit. It is a familiar phenomenon in a familiar friend of man. There is a saddle-shaped area on the back of the dog over which it was found empirically that even a light stimulus when applied rhythmically, produces the “scalptor-reflex” or a reflex rhythmical action of the flexor muscles of the leg on the same side, calculated to remove the irritating causes of the stimulus. ”

“ He who concerns himself with the fundamental difficulties of the problems at issue in evolution must make his notes of what experts tell him of such groups as those of Insects, Mollusca and Birds, and pass on to the higher forms in which on the one hand function becomes the predominant partner, and on the other individual experience becomes more and more important. ”

“ For at least seventy years the surface of the human skin has been the subject of so much physiological observa­tion and experiment that Professor Sherrington considers the literature connected with it to be probably greater than in any other branch of physiology. Most of this study centres round the skin as a receptive field and problems of the nervous system. It is easy to see why this should be in the case of an organ so great as the skin, covering all the other structures and organs and exposed through ages of evolution to the vicissitudes of an inconceivable number of stimuli. ”