Primate

“ He strode forward to hasten the first meeting between Primate and Feline on the common ground of civilization.
VI.
The catman's steps faltered. This alien, that had come from some distant star, was definitely primate in evolution. He knew primates—they had primates on Sscantoo, here—and primates were nasty animals. They were filled with curiosity—mass curiosity—that had been the basis for a platitude on Sscantoo: "Curiosity saved a mansee." When you killed or wounded a primate, the woods would fill up with curious, chattering hordes of his fellow-primates. ”

“ These warm expressions of esteem and regard, if known to the new primate, must have inspired him with renewed courage to accept the grave responsibilities imposed upon him, and truly, if ever man required the support of friends to nerve him to encounter dangers and unheard-of opposition, he did. ”

“ In other words, we have what the scientist calls the non-human primate, a low form of animal without intellect, but capable of so improving its own physical organization as to create for itself and within itself that essence which we recognize as the human mind. ”

“ The Primates, or apes, are, as we have seen, the highest order of the great class of mammals. Most of them, like other comparatively defenseless vertebrates, are gregarious or even social.3 They have a feeling of kind, if not of kindness, [Pg 7] toward one another. This sociability, together with the family as a unit of social structure, has contributed incalculably to human intellectual and moral development. Man is a Primate, a distant cousin of the highest apes, though no one of these represents our “furry arboreal ancestor with pointed ears.” ”

“ His origin can be specified even more accurately. The mammals fall into a number of fairly distinct groups, such as the Carnivores or flesh-eating animals, the Ungulates or hoofed animals, the Rodents or gnawing animals, the Cetaceans or whales, and several others. The highest of these mammalian groups, as usually reckoned, is the Primate or “first” order of the animal kingdom. This Primate group includes the various monkeys and apes and man. The ancestors of the human race are therefore to be sought somewhere in the order of Primates, past or present. ”

“ Wherever, for instance, these scientists may place the non-human primate, out of which man has been evolved by what is called natural selection, and whether they do or do not assume that he was a creation of an intelligent will, they do not, as I understand, claim that the primate was endowed with what we call intellect ”

“ Not only in his pentadactylate hands and feet, but also in other anatomical features does man show the characteristic inherited features of his stock more clearly than many other mammals, as, for example, ungulates, cetaceans, and bats.
The immeasurable significance which this secure knowledge of the primate origin of man possesses for the entire range of human science lies clear before the eyes of every unprejudiced and logical thinker. ”

“ I want to remind your honor that if men and monkeys are in the same class, called primates, that doesn't settle the question, for it is possible that some of those primates are the descendants of other primates, but if it were true that every primate was in a class by itself and was not descended from any other primate, therefore, according to evolution all the primates in that class descended from other animals, evolved from that class, and you go back to the primates, to the one evolved until you et to the one-cell animal in the bottom of the sea. ”

“ While recognizing that the task of prospecting for an anthropoid or primate station may in its outcome prove incomparably more important for the biological and sociological sciences and for human welfare than my experimental study of ideational behavior, I give the latter first place in this report, reserving for the concluding section an account of the situation regarding our knowledge of the monkeys, apes, and other primates, and a description of a plan and program for the thorough-going and long continued study of these organisms in a permanent station or research institute. ”

“ Man stands unquestionably in the primate order of animals, because he has certain qualities of structure which all primates have, and which all other animals have not: hands and arms and nails, a bagpipe stomach, great subordination of the cerebellum, a disc-like placenta, teeth differentiated into incisors, canines, and molars, and pectoral milk glands.
Man is more closely akin to the anthropoid apes than to the other primates on account of his immense brain, his ape-like face, his vertical spine, and in being a true two-handed biped. ”

“ The higher the primate in the scale of organization the more perfectly are its forelimbs and hands adapted to seizing and handling objects, and its hind limbs to supporting and moving the body; and the whole sole of the foot rests upon the ground. ”

“ In his splendid work, fifty years in advance of his time, the Philosophie Zoologique (1809) , he clearly traced the modifications and advances that must have taken place in the transformation of the man-like apes (the primate forms similar to the orang and the chimpanzee) ; the adaptation to walking upright, the consequent modification of the hands and feet, and later, the formation of speech and the attainment of a higher degree of intelligence. ”

“ Hence in turning the fore foot into a hand, for climbing and grasping purposes, the primitive Primate entered upon the path of brain-development. Even the earliest Primates show large brains in comparison with the small brains of their contemporaries.
It is a familiar fact in the animal world that when a certain group enters upon a particular path of evolution, some members of the group advance only a little way along it, some go farther, and some outstrip all the others. The development of social life among the bees will illustrate this. ”

“ The facts of anatomy, physiology, and embryology, of which we have given illustrations, all point to man's affiliation with the order of monkeys and apes. To this order is given the name Primates, and our first and second question must be when and whence the Primates began. The rock record answers the first question: the Primates emerged about the dawn of the Eocene era, when grass was beginning to cover the earth with a garment. ”

“ One of the important phases of general paleontological work which must receive special attention is the early history of the primate order with particular reference to the development of those characteristics which are most prominent in the human family. ”

“ Strangely enough, the practical importance of knowledge of the primates has seldom been dwelt upon even by those biologists who are especially interested in it. It is, therefore, appropriate to emphasize the strictly human value of the work for which I am seeking provision. ”

“ The primates mean that order of organisms which include the lemurs, the tailed monkeys of this hemisphere, the tailless monkeys, the ape and baboon and so on of the eastern hemisphere and man and also quite a large number of forms of whose—of whom we have a satisfactory fossil record which we may class as apes or may class as men. ”

“ All the momentous consequences that follow from it in regard to our human nature, our past and future, and our bodily and psychic life, remain undisturbed whether we derive man directly from one of the primates, an ape or lemur, or from some other branch, some unknown lower form, of the mammalian stem. ”

“ There is thus a remarkable set of structures in the face of a higher primate which convey mental emotion. As they also belong to animals with a high degree of convolu­tion of brain, though certain are found in lower mammals, their specialisa­tion is only to be accounted for by the long-continued involuntary expression of mental states existing in the particular form of primate. Professor Keith says in the work before referred to: “Muscles supplied by the facial nerve are the physical basis into which many mental states are reflected, and in which they are realised. ”

“ In view of the probable values of increasingly complete accounts of primate life, it seems far from extravagant to insist that the securing of adequate provision for systematic and long continued research is the most important task for our generation of biologists and the one which we shall be least excusable for neglecting. ”

“ If, as seems probable, the primates display a vast increase of associations, and a stock of free-swimming ideas, our view gives to the line of descent a meaning which it never could have so long as the question was the vague one of more or less ‘intelligence.’ It will, I hope, when supported by an investigation of the mental life of the primates and of the period in child life when these directly practical associations become overgrown by a rapid [155] luxuriance of free ideas, show us the real history of the origin of human faculty. ”

“ The results of various kinds of observation should be correlated so that there should ultimately emerge a unitary and practically valuable account of primate life, to replace the patchwork of information which we now possess. ”

“ To one unacquainted with the facts of vertebrate comparative anatomy, the distinguishing characteristics of the primates seem to be trivial in nature. It is surprising to find how insignificant are the details to which appeal must be made in order to draw a line between our own division of mammalia and the others. ”

“ And now, after almost nine hundred generations of development, covering about twenty-one thousand years from the origin of the dawn mammals, the Primates suddenly gave birth to two remarkable creatures, the first true human beings. ”

“ But let the primate himself live, not, as is customary, here and there in the country, but in one city according to their selection, to the end that he may be better able to bring to bear the influence of the dignity that has fallen to him in resisting the Donatists. ”

“ Because of the costliness of maintaining and breeding the monkeys and apes, it is especially desirable that the several kinds of research mentioned above should be conducted. Indeed, it would seem inexcusably wasteful to attempt to maintain a primate or anthropoid station for psychological observations alone, or for any other narrowly limited biological inquiry. ”

“ Perhaps, when all is said and done, it marks the difference between man and the lesser mammals, the thing that has evolved a certain species of the primates—simply woods creatures that trembled at the storm and cowered in the night—into the rulers and monarchs of the earth. ”

“ The dentition is complete, containing all four classes—incisors, canine, premolars, and molars. Primates are also distinguished from all the other placentals by important features in the special construction of the skull and the brain; and these are the more striking in proportion to their development and the lateness of their appearance in the history of the earth. In all these important anatomical features our human organism agrees with that of all the other primates: man is a true primate. ”

“ In your epoch, primates ate many domestic animals who differed less in intelligence quotient from them than differ civilized Tegurians from human primates like yourself ... the gap today is much greater.... ”

“ The comparative psychology of man and the higher animals enables us to learn from the highest group of the placentals, the primates, the long strides by which the human soul has advanced beyond the psyche of the anthropoid ape. The phylogeny of the mammals and of [Pg 150] the lower vertebrates acquaints us with the long series of the earlier ancestors of the primates which have arisen within this stem since the Silurian age. All these vertebrates agree in the structure and development of their characteristic psychic organ—the spinal cord. ”

“ The group of mammals which includes the monkeys, apes, and man we call the primates.
Although anatomically there is a greater difference between the lowest type of monkey and the highest type of ape than there is between the highest type of ape and the lowest savage, yet there is an immense mental gap between monkey and man. ”

“ When about fourteen years of age, they fled from the tribe, going west to raise their family and establish the new species of Primates. And these new creatures are very properly denominated Primates since they were the direct and immediate animal ancestors of the human family itself. ”

“ One may go farther and affirm that, given certain anatomical and physiological facts in an earlier Primate stock, which marvellously resemble those of modern man, and it must follow as the night the day that his more primitive physical basis employed in a new mode of progression, that is of terrestrial walking on two feet, will be converted by use and habit into the construc­tion of such new formations as will best agree with the new style—in other words, in this instance, a plantar arch. ”

“ It is, indeed, impossible to observe any of the primates without noting most interesting and illuminating activities. And although the major portion of my time was spent in hard and monotonous work with my experimental apparatus, I found time each day to get into intimate touch with the free activities of my subjects and to observe their social relations and varied expressions of individuality. ”