OUR ARBOREAL ANCESTORS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXII, Issue 9711, 5 January 1895, Page 2 (Supplement)

OUR ARBOREAL ANCESTORS.

That there is the slightest similarity discoverable between a baby and an ape is an assertion that every mother worthy of the name should dispute to the death (remarks the London Daily Telegraph). Yeb a bold writer in one of the magazines has come forward to tell us that an infant's nose, for example, is fashioned in a way which goes to prove conclusively his near affinity to the monkey tribes. He begins by reminding us that the word for monkey in Lafcin means "snub-nosed," and he explains how on its first appearance on the stage of life a human baby's nose " makes a concave curve, the nostrils being obliquely truncate." Gradually the organ lengthens and emerges, "so that the snubnosed baby grows into a more or less longnosed, and it may be hook-nosed, man." As to the delusion sedulously upheld by visitors and nurses that the new-born infant is "just like its father" or "just like its mother," the writer characterises this as a gross libel, for, he remarks without much consideration for maternal susceptibilities, "If when adult we had features like our babies, we should have a countenance of a negroid type." All this is rather hard on the human picaninny, who cannot write magazine articles to contradict it; and bo tho scientific traducer of babyhood has ib all his own way. A little time ago some fell "scientist" actually experimented on newly arrived morsels of humanity by getting them to awing from a pole clasped in their hands; and he argued that the prehensile hand of a baby obviously allied ib to the prehensile tail of a monkey. As to the tails, the writer to whom we have referred has a great deal to say. The subject, however, is really too humiliating, and it is more interesting to read how the soothing action of a cradle on a crying infant is a survival from the time when the young of our arboreal ancestors were rocked to sleep on swaying boughs of trees. Originally, too, affirms this bold theorist, man, besides having a tail, also possessed a "hare-lip'—a lip which is divided into two parts by a deep fissuite, each parb capable of independent movement. Gradually the need of a double action lip died away and the parts joined, leaving however a furrow observable to this day,.especially in babies and young children. We cannot.promise the writer of an able bub revolutionary paper that his theories will be warmly accepted in nursery circles. They may, of course, be true; and we could bring to his attention as a singular confirmation of his views that mothers are often heard in —in moments of forgetfulness—to speak of their progeny, especially male ones, in holiday time, as "little monkeys." If, however, we accept his conclusions we shall have to alter Wordsworth's famous line aboub the child being father of the man to " the child is cousin of tho chimpaazw,"