T

NATHANIEL S. SHALER

PROFESSOR of geology, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

HE largest gift of modern science is in the ample and rationalizing perspectives it affords. Our ancestors had to take the

world as they found it, making the best they could of the immediate good and evil which they found there; charging all of its greater problems to an inscrutable providence whose doings they could faithfully accept. Now the same good faith requires us to look into the verifications of our modern learning to see how our blessings and curses are alike the product of the series of events which have brought us here. If we fail to see the explanation, we know full well that our lack of knowledge is not due to any limits set by the divine will upon our understanding, but to the failure of our efforts to find the way to it. Beginning with the interpretation of the physical part of the earth and of the celestial bodies, this modern view of the universe has been extended until it begins to include mankind. We no longer look upon ourselves in the manner of our forefathers as creatures instantly bidden to our place in the realm. We see that momentary as are our individual lives they are essentially as old as the continents and seas; that all we are, think, or do is, or is done, because of our history.

New as is this mode of regarding man, it has already done more than all the speculations of philosophy to explain his nature. As the direct creation of an infinite beneficence, he was in his mixture of good and evil utterly inexplicable. As the child of the lower life, on his long and difficult way to a higher plane of existence, his entangled nature, though still a riddle, is evidently one that may be hopefully studied by those devices of science which have shown us how very many imperfections of man's body are but the remnants of utilities among the beasts whence he came. The method which has explained the existence of that nefarious appendix of the intestine, the origin of the club foot, of the cleft palate, and a host of like afflictions is now guiding us to an understanding of our moral deficiency. We see that in our efforts to rise we drag a lengthening chain where each link was forged in the life of lower man or that of the brutes whence they came.

All the baser passions and motives of men that contend against his advance towards a higher moral and social station, prove on inquiry to have had their origin in the brutal stages of his history, when the life which in time was to be human was still in the shape of the beasts. This

Copyright, 1903, Frederick A. Richardson, all rights reserved.

is more easily to be traced in the simpler emotions, such as rage, fear, greed, and lust, but as we shall see, it is also evident in those of a more completed nature, such as lead men to war. Nowhere else, indeed, in all the wonderful tangle of human nature can we so well divine how our ancient residence in brutes and brutal men has fixed in us qualities which contend against our better modern part. An analysis of this motive of combat shows how those mental relicts of antiquity, surviving as do the like inheritances in our bodies, serve to qualify or annul the work of the nobler impulses.

To see how fixed is the motive of combat in the inheritance of man, it needs to be clearly understood that every organic species has gained its place in the world by a process of contention. In the plants and lowlier animals the ground is won by a dumb insistence, by a mechanical bearing down or pushing aside of other kinds that contend with it for a place in the world. As soon, however, as the beings attain, on the ascending scale, to the station where the will begins to guide action, we find that the battle for the chances of life becomes more intense and better ordered. Each individual of the kind wins its needed food, its desired mates, or its safety from enemies by war-like activities. The opportunity of living, and of handing on its qualities to descendants, depends upon the vigor with which the conflict is waged. From the point of view of our own morality this perspective of endless strife is unpleasant, but it is in the highest measure instructive, for it shows us the very foundations of our nature in the ancient hell of war, out of which man under the guidance of his true prophets is slowly finding his way.

It is impossible in the present condition of our knowledge, to trace with any approach to accuracy the succession of beings through which the life of man passed on its way from the lowest vitalized forms to its present estate. We have, however, to reckon that in this succession there were species most likely exceeding one hundred thousand in number. Though we cannot reconstruct the great procession of our ancestors, we can, from a relatively late yet remote stage in the ongoing, discern about what their shapes were, and make some tolerably accurate determinations as to their habits. We can, in a word, determine about the conditions in which the qualities which were to be the birthright of the primitive man were nurtured, if not originated.

The lowliest and most ancient creatures which we may fairly presume to have been the ancestors of our kind, belonged to a group of pouched mammals, the kinsmen in rather near degree of our opossum. They were small animals, not larger than the domesticated cat, probably dwellers in trees; subsisting as the shape of their teeth indicates on hard shelled

insects, such as beetles. The nature of their food and that of the living forms most nearly related to them, such as the microlestes of Australia, shows us pretty clearly that they were by no means the despots of the Triassic time, but as inoffensive as any creature could well be in a world where the life was won by offending the neighbor. From this, the earliest known of the suck giving animals, the main line of the succession which led to man probably continued to abide in the branches of the forests. This is shown by the persistence of the long limbs, with the fingers and toes and the bones that connect them with the limbs, so arranged that they serve for grasping the boughs rather than for moving over the surface of the earth or rending the bodies of their prey.

After the earliest pouched mammals came a long series made up of species of which we have yet found no monuments among the fossils. Of these we may well believe that there were hundreds, if not thousands, of distinct kinds before we attained the level of the group commonly called the lemurs, the lowest of the monkeys.

That these as yet unknown stages of passage were also arboreal is well indicated by the fact that the limbs and feet of the higher forms retain those features which fit them for life amid the boughs, and which would have made their ancestors entirely unsuited to dwelling on the ground. So, too, the character of the teeth and what is known of the habits of the existing lemurs show that the original insect diet had been extended so that the creatures were fruit eaters as well. Most interesting of all these inferences is that in this evolution from the early marsupial to the monkeys, there is little or no evidence that the creatures were ever to any considerable extent specialized for combat, certainly not so after the manner of beasts of prey. Their claws are relatively weak and not built for effective rending; the like is indicated by their jaws and teeth, which were evidently shaped almost altogether for feeding and not mainly, as in the carnivora, for weapons. They have, it is true, those canine or eye teeth which are the marks of the lethal habit among mammals, but these instruments are not strongly developed and probably served effectively only in the combats between the males of the species.

Even before the grade of the lowest existing monkeys was attained, an interesting variation was wrought out which pretty clearly indicates the trending of our ancestors towards a habit of life in which combat was of less importance than it was in earlier times, or than it continued to be among the forms that dwelt upon the ground. The ancient claws with which the extremities were armed for attack and defence, from a stage far below that of the lowest mammal, underwent a change by which it is converted into the human-like nail. Though this alteration may seem

at first sight of no great meaning, it is really most significant. The claw served primarily for fighting and in an incidental way to aid in clinging to the bark of the trunk or branches of trees which were too large to be grasped. It was altered to the flat, thin nail in order to support the broad, sensitive pads of the extremities by means of which the precious instrument of touch we have in our finger tips was made possible. It is, indeed, a beautiful instance in which the grosser needs of militancy give place to the higher service of intelligence. The institution of the nail may fairly be taken as the first clear sign that the series of arboreal mammals through which man came, was destined to win its way upward to its great accomplishment. From the main stem of the mammalian life, which was evidently developed and continued in the upper portion of the tropical forests, there came in succession many branches, leading to a great variety of forms modified to fit other than arboreal conditions. The carnivora, the cats, bears, and their kindred have departed not very far from the ancestral climbing habit, retaining in varied measure that way of life. The solid and cloven footed forms have left it altogether. From these groups that became adapted to life on the ground, other and more far-reaching changes in habits and structures have led to the aquatic creatures such as the seals and whales. But while on many different lines of variation the mammals became reconciled to the environment of the ground, the under earth, or the water, only one group, the bats, found its way to the fields of the air.

It is a noteworthy fact that all those groups of mammals which betook themselves to the surface of the earth, except those of such small size that their only chance of safety was in flight, soon became provided with habits and instruments especially devised for combat: rending claws or teeth, horns in endless variety, hoofs to pierce as a spear or smite as effectively as a mace,—an arsenal of weapons that indicates how very intense is the struggle in the realm of the fields, where a great variety of species are crowded together. On the other hand, the arboreal species in the ages in which they have dwelt amid the branches, have, as before noted, developed no parts which serve lethal purposes.

The lack of all specialized weapons in the arboreal species through which came the succession that led through the monkeys to man, and especially the ancient alteration, above noted, of the claws to finger nails, show very clearly that these creatures were in some degree protected from the more brutal struggle for place and safety which the larger and lower dwelling beasts had to meet. All we observe of the habits of monkeys, from the lemurs to the man-like apes, supports the conclusion that they are, and always have been, for their size, the least militant of mammals.

It is evident that their conditions of life favor a peaceful habit; their food being limited to fruits, seeds, and insects, does not lead to predatory habits. The rather scanty nature of the food supply which even the most prolific forests afford and their slow increase hinder the development of the species to anything like the numbers which the ordinary herbivora may attain, so that they are not forced to undertake wide-ranging migrations. Moreover, the conditions of life in the trees make any creature especially fitted thereto essentially safe from the assaults of predaceous animals which have been modified for life on the ground. There was, we may be sure, much fighting among the males and between rival tribes and species, but this stream of forest life was evidently far less tumultuous than those which coursed over the ground.

Those who have read the popular accounts of the gorilla are likely to cite the reputation of this great ape as evidence that the monkeys, however the conditions of their development have made for peace, have the essential qualities of the tiger. The most serious charges against the character of this unpleasant brute are evidently untrustworthy. That the males are likely to resent the invasion of their haunts by men is true, as is the fact that they may assail the intruder much after the manner of the dominant biped. Their readiness to defend their families is not to be counted as a mark of degradation. Left to themselves they are far more peaceable than most wild brutes of like strength. Moreover, they are not in any sense beasts of prey, for they subsist on fruits. It is also to be noted that the gorilla, though evidently not in the direct ancestry of man, is one of the larger apes which has adopted the habit of abiding much on the ground, and has thus been brought into associations which have tended to develop his militant qualities. He is exposed as are none of the other simians to the attacks of large predaceous forms, and has of necessity developed the fighting habit.

We have yet to learn when, where, and by just what steps, the passage from the man-like apes to man was made. It is eminently probable that the transition took place in the early part of the Tertiary age, some hundreds of thousands, possibly some million years ago; that it occurred in some of the existing, or now submerged, lands about the Indian Ocean, and that the first creature fairly to be called human was of rather small size, about as hairy as a monkey, with a dark skin, and a countenance by no means prepossessing. It may be accepted as certain that the last of our ancestors to be classed with the brutes did not belong in the species of any of the existing apes. The kinship of this momentous unknown was rather with the chimpanzees than with the gorillas, but rather widely away from either. It was remote from the baboons, which is somewhat