| Show AS SCIENCE VIEWS ADVANCE OF MAN erect position put him above beasts from a single fossil skull dincov ered in the desert wilds of central australia sir colln colin mackenzie deduces the fact or at least the con elusion that the erect posture dom injates man mans s intellectual system and shows that all intellectual develop ment has a muscular basis at first glance it Is a little difficult to per belve how a skull which Is not a whole skull but only a portion of one and which la 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 under stand it we must first imagine the creature from which man Is descend ed going on all fours he ile had not yet assumed the erect position he ile 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 lep in that position he sees above the grass lie ile Is en abbed to observe the approach of the possible mastodon who will grind him to death and to hide from him with his incident this groveling crea ture s relative advance begins from that time on he and his gle toward the maintenance of an erect position they employ craft they learn a superior mode of ghyst cal progression and thereby they at tain a superiority over other crea tures A step surely resulting from this point Is the liberation of the crea tures forelegs from the function of progression and their gradually in creased usefulness in providing easier means of subsistence with practice now the creatures front paws be 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 crea ture can seize and hold any article 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 of course at the stage noted the mind Is yet to come but it Is now an inevitable thing for the improvement achieved makes the newly developed species gregarious superior individuals learn to dominate their fellows communication becomes necessary language la Is developed from grunts and squeaks society Is organized thoughts are tire expressed thus from the bones and muscles of the legs from the bones and muscles of the hands an intellectual development has been evolved the great thing was to get started and the start was the erect posture quod erat demons says the professor but of course all this Is not a demonstration it Is only a speculation sir colln colin mackenzie s notion about the dependence of in tel development on muscle Is pure lamarch was a french naturalist who was born in 1744 and died in 1829 he ile was the forerunner of darwin who accepted his doctrine of acquired characters what Lani ards taught Is con centered 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 earths 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 survived when their shorter necked fellows perished it was they who propagated their species which became increasingly long necked the primitive man getting on his feet in the tall grass Is practically doing the same thing that La marcks s giraffe did sir conlin macli mackenzue Mac engles s deductions from the discovery of the skull in the australian desert demonstrate that Is coming to his own in the field of evolutionary science they demonstrate nothing else that Is as yet boston transcript |
