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Show AS SCIENCE VIEWS ADVANCE OF MAN Erect Position Put Him Above Beasts. From a single fossil skull discovered discov-ered in the desert wilds of Central Australia, Sir Colin MacKenzie deduces de-duces the fact or at least the conclusion con-clusion that "the erect posture dominates dom-inates man's intellectual system, and shows that all intellectual development develop-ment has a muscular basis." At first glance it is a little difficult to perceive per-ceive how a skull which is not a whole skull, but only a portion of one, and which is supposed to be, and probably is, a relic of a primitive kind of human being, can teach the scientist all that. It takes a good equipment of imagination to understand under-stand it. We must first imagine the creature from which man is descended descend-ed going on all fours. He had not yet assumed the erect position. He was then like any other beast of the jungle. Any bigger beast might tread him to death under its feet. Mastery was a matter of size. But one day, the beast, groveling in the tall grass, through some accident, or freak, or the help of a stump or a rock, gets upon his hind legs. In that position i he sees above the grass. He is enabled en-abled to observe the approach of the possible mastodon who will grind him to death, and to hido from him. With his incident, this groveling creature's crea-ture's relative advance begins. From that time on, he and his species struggle strug-gle toward the maintenance of an erect position. They employ craft; they learn a superior mode of physical physi-cal progression, and thereby they attain at-tain a superiority over other creatures. crea-tures. A step surely resulting from this point is the liberation of the creature's crea-ture's forelegs from the function of progression and their gradually increased in-creased usefulness in providing easier means of subsistence. With practice, now. the creatures' front paws he-come he-come hands. By development, one of the paw projections which once were mere claws becomes a thumb, which by repeated use becomes opposed to the other claws now fingers so that the creature crea-ture can seize and hold any nticle. Now the animal who Is on the road to become a man has achieved a point of superiority to the ape. all of whose "fingers" are In a row who does not possess the opposed thumb. Counting by thousands of centuries, the new "man" now gets beyond the ape by leaps and bounds. Without the opposed thumb the "man" would have remained In the half erected, or only occasionally erected position of the ape. Together, the erect posture and the opposed thumb made man. the master of his own evolution. 1 Of course at the stage noted the "mind" is yet to come. But it is now an inevitable thing, for the improvement improve-ment achieved makes the newly developed de-veloped species gregarious. Superior individuals learn to dominate their fellows. Communication becomes necessary. Language is developed from grunts and squeaks. Society is organized. Thoughts are expressed. Thus from the hones and muscles of the legs, from the bones and muscles of the hands, an "intellectual development" devel-opment" has been evolved. The great tiling was to get started, and the start was the erect posture. "Quod crat demonstrandum," says the professor. But of course all this is not a demonstration. It is only a speculation. Sir Colin MacKenzie's notion about the dependence of Intellectual In-tellectual development on muscle is pure Lamarekianism. Lamarck was a French naturalist who was born in 1744 and died in 1S29. He was the forerunner of Darwin, who accepted his doctrine of "acquired characters." What Lamarck taught is concentered in his account of the manner in which the giraffe acquired his long neck. An ordinary antelope who lived in a South African region, where, from increasing aridity, food for the antelope on the earth's sur- ; face disappeared, could graze only at ! the tops of trees. Such individual beasts as had the longest necks could reach food and survive. Those individuals indi-viduals survived when their shorter-necked shorter-necked fellows perished; it was they who propagated their species, which became increasingly long-necked. Tha primitive man, getting on his feet In the tall grass, Is practically doing the same thing that Lamarck's giraffe did. Sir Conlin MacKenzie's deductions from the discovery of the skull in the Australian desert demonstrate that Lamarck is coming to his own In the field of evolutionary science. They demonstrate nothing else that Is, as yet. Boston Transcript. |