SPEECH-MAKING.
I have before me two or three examples of notes of Mr. Gladstone’s speeches; one of them refers to one of the most important of his addresses on 50 the customs question. It was a long speech, extending, if I remember rightly, to considerably over an hour. Yet the memoranda consist purely of four or five sentences of two or three words apiece, written on a single sheet of note paper, and no hint of the course of the oration is given. Occasionally, no doubt, especially in the case of the speech on the introduction of the Home Rule Bill, which was to my mind the finest Mr. Gladstone has ever delivered, the notes were rather more extensive than this, but as a rule they are extremely brief. When Mr. Gladstone addresses a great public meeting, the most elaborate pains are taken to insure his comfort. He can now only read the very largest print, and careful and delicate arrangements are made to provide him with lamps throwing the light on the desk or table near which 51 he stands. Sir Andrew Clark observes the most jealous watchfulness over his patient. A curious instance of this occurred at Newcastle, when Mr. Gladstone was delivering his address to the great liberal caucus which assembles as the annual meeting of the National Liberal Federation. Sir Andrew had insisted that the orator should confine himself to a speech lasting only an hour. Fearing that his charge would forget all about his promise in the excitement of speaking, the physician, slipped onto the platform and timed Mr. Gladstone, watch in hand. The hour passed, but there was no pause in the torrent of words. Sir Andrew was in despair. At last he pencilled a note to Mr. Morley, beseeching him to insist upon the speech coming to an end. But Mr. Morley would not undertake the responsibility of cutting a great oration, and the result was that Mr. Gladstone stole another half hour from time and his physician. The next day a friend of mine went breathlessly up to Sir Andrew, and asked how the statesman had borne the additional strain. “He did not turn a hair,” was the reply. Practically the only sign of physical failure which is apparent in recent speeches has been that the voice tends to break and die away after about an hour’s exercise, and for a moment the sound of the curiously veiled notes and a glance at the marble pallor of the face gives one the impression that after all Mr. Gladstone is a very, very old man. But there is never anything like a total breakdown. And no one is aware of the enormous stores of physical energy on which the prime minister can draw, who has not sat quite close to him, and measured the wonderful breadth of his shoulders and heard his voice coming straight from his chest in great bouffées of sound. Then you forget all about the heavy wrinkles in the white face, the scanty silver hair, and the patriarchal look of the figure before you.
THE GLADSTONE FAMILY.
WHERE MAN GOT HIS EARS.
By Henry Drummond, LL.D., F.R.S.E., F.G.S.
One of the most humorous sights in nature, less common in America than Europe, is a snail wandering about with a shell on its back. The progenitors of snails once lived in the sea, and when they evolved themselves ashore they carried this relic of the water with them,—an anomaly which, seen to-day, seems as ridiculous as if one were to meet an Indian in Paris with his canoe on his back. But there are more animals besides snails that once lived in the water. If embryology is any guide to the past, nothing is more certain than that the ancient progenitors of Man once lived an aquatic life. As the traveller, wandering in foreign lands, brings back all manner of curios to remind him where he has been—clubs and spears, clothes and pottery, which represent the ways of life of those whom he has met, so the body of Man, returning from its long journey through the animal kingdom, emerges laden with the spoils of its watery pilgrimage. These relics are not mere curiosities; they are as real as the clubs and spears, the clothes and pottery. Like them, they were once a part of life’s vicissitude; they represent organs which have been outgrown; old forms of apparatus long since exchanged for better, yet somehow not yet destroyed by the hand of time. The physical body of Man, so great is the number of these relics, is an old curiosity-shop, a museum of obsolete anatomies, discarded tools, outgrown and aborted organs. All other animals also contain among their useful organs a proportion which are long past their work; and so significant are these rudiments of a former state of things, that anatomists have often expressed their willingness to stake the theory of Evolution upon their presence alone.
Prominent among these vestigial structures, as they are called, are those which smack of the sea. At one time there was nothing else in the world but water-life; all the land animals are late inventions. One reason why animals began in the water is that it is easier to live in the water—anatomically and physiologically cheaper—than to live on the land. The denser element supports the body better, demanding a less supply of muscle and bone; and the perpetual motion of the sea brings the food to the animal, making it unnecessary for the animal to move to the food. This and other correlated circumstances call for far less mechanism in the body, and, as a matter of fact, all the simplest forms of life at the present day are inhabitants of the water.
“BALANOGLOSSUS” (AFTER AGASSIZ), AND LARGE SEA LAMPREY (AFTER CUVIER AND HAECKEL), SHOWING GILL-SLITS.—FROM “DARWIN AND AFTER DARWIN” BY ROMANES.
A successful attempt at coming ashore may be seen in the common worm. The worm is still so unacclimatized to land life that instead of living on the earth like other creatures, it lives in it, as if it were a thicker water, and always where there is enough moisture to keep up the traditions of its past. Probably it took to the shore originally by exchanging, first the water for the ooze at the bottom, then by wriggling among muddy flats when the tide was out, and finally, as the struggle for life grew keen, it pushed further and further inland, continuing its migration so long as dampness was to be found. Its cousin the snail, again, goes even further, for it not only carries its shell ashore but when it cannot get moisture, actually manufactures it.
EMBRYOS SHOWING GILL-SLITS.—FROM HAECKEL’s “EVOLUTION OF MAN.”
A. FISH. B. CHICK. C. CALF. D. MAN.
When Man left the water, however,—or what was to develop into Man—he took very much more ashore with him than a shell. Instead of crawling ashore at the worm stage, he remained in the water until he evolved into something like a fish; so that when, after an amphibian interlude, he finally left it, many “ancient and fish-like” characters remained in his body to tell the tale. Now, it is among these piscine characteristics that we find the clue to where Man got his ears. The chief characteristic of a fish is its apparatus for breathing the air dissolved in the water. This consists of gills supported on strong arches, the branchial arches, which in the Elasmobranch fishes are from five to seven in number and uncovered with any operculum, or lid. Communicating with these arches, in order to allow the water which has been taken in at the mouth to pass out at the gills, an equal number of slits or openings are provided in the neck. Without these holes in their neck all fishes would instantly perish, and we may be sure Nature took exceptional care in perfecting this particular piece of the mechanism. Now it is one of the most extraordinary facts in natural history that these slits in the fish’s neck are still represented in the neck of Man. Almost the most prominent feature, indeed, after the head, in every mammalian embryo, are the four clefts or furrows of the old gill-slits.[1] They are still known in embryology by no other name—gill-slits—and so persistent are these characters that children have been known to be born with them not only externally visible—which is a common occurrence—but open, through and through, so that fluids taken in at the mouth could pass through them and trickle out at the neck. This fact was so astounding as to be for a long time denied. It was thought that when this happened, the orifice must have been accidentally made by the probe of the surgeon. But Dr. Sutton has recently met with actual cases where this has occurred. “I have seen milk,” he says, “issue from such fistulæ in individuals who have never been submitted to sounding.”[2]
In the common case of children born with these vestiges, the old gill-slits are represented by small openings in the skin on the sides of the neck and capable of admitting a thin probe. Sometimes the place where they have been in childhood is marked throughout life by small round patches of white skin. These relics of the sea, these apparitions of the Fish, these sudden resurrections, are betrayals of man’s pedigree. Men wonder at mummy-wheat germinating after a thousand years of dormancy. But here are ancient features bursting into life after unknown ages, and challenging modern science for a verdict on their affinities.
When the fish came ashore, its water-breathing apparatus was no longer of any use to it. At first it had to keep it on, for it took a long time to perfect the air-breathing apparatus which was to replace it. But when this was ready the problem was, what to do with the earlier organ? Nature is exceedingly economical, and could not throw all this mechanism away. In fact Nature almost never parts with any structure she has once made. What she does is to change it into something else. Conversely, Nature seldom makes anything new; her method of creation is to adapt something old. Now when Nature started out to manufacture ears, she made them out of the old breathing apparatus. She saw that if 54 water could pass through a hole in the neck, sound could pass likewise, and she set to work upon the highest up of the five gill-slits and slowly elaborated it into a hearing organ.
ADULT SHARK (AFTER CUVIER AND HAECKEL).—FROM “DARWIN AND AFTER DARWIN.”
There never had been an external ear in the world till this was done, or any good ear at all. Creatures which live in water do not seem to use hearing much, and the sound-waves in fishes are simply conveyed through the walls of the head to the internal ear without any definite mechanism. But as soon as land-life began, owing to the changed medium through which sound-waves must now be propagated, a more delicate instrument was required. And hence one of the first things attended to was the construction and improvement of the ear.
MARBLE HEAD OF SATYR, IN MUNICH, SHOWING CERVICAL AURICLES.
It has long been a growing certainty to Comparative Anatomy that the external and middle ear in Man are simply a development, an improved edition, of the first gill-cleft and its surrounding parts. The tympano-Eustachian passage is the homologue or counterpart of the spiracle, associated in the shark with the first gill-opening. Professor His of Leipsic has worked out the whole development in minute detail, and conclusively demonstrated the mode of origin of the external ear from the coalescence of six rounded tubercles surrounding the first branchial cleft at an early period of embryonic life. Haeckel’s account of the process is as follows: “All the essential parts of the middle ear—the tympanic membrane, tympanic cavity, and Eustachian tube—develop from the first gill-opening with its surrounding parts, which in the Primitive Fishes (Selachii) remains throughout life as an open blowhole, situated between the first and second gill-arches. In the embryos of higher Vertebrates it closes in the centre, the point of concrescence forming the tympanic membrane. The remaining outer part of the first gill-opening is the rudiment of the outer ear-canal. From the inner part originates the tympanic cavity, and further inward, the Eustachian tube. In connection with these, the three bonelets of the ear develop from the first two gill-arches; the hammer and anvil from the first, and the stirrup from the upper end of the second gill-arch. Finally as regards the external ear, the ear-shell (concha auris), and the outer ear-canal, leading from the shell to the tympanic membrane—these parts develop in the simplest way from the skin-covering which borders the outer orifice of the first gill-opening. At this point the ear-shell rises in the form of a circular fold of skin, in which cartilage and muscles afterwards form.”[3]
HEAD OF SATYR IN GROUP OF MARSYAS AND APOLLO, NAPLES MUSEUM, SHOWING CERVICAL AURICLES.
Now bearing in mind this account of the origin of ears, an extraordinary circumstance confronts us. Ears are actually sometimes found bursting out in human beings half way down the neck, in the exact position—namely along the line of the anterior border of the sterno-mastoid muscle—which the gill-slits would occupy if they still persisted. In some human families where the tendency to retain these special structures is strong, one member sometimes illustrates the abnormality by possessing the clefts alone, another has a cervical ear, while a third has both a cleft and an ear,—all these of course in addition to the ordinary ears. This cervical auricle has all the characters of the ordinary ear, “it contains yellow elastic cartilage, is skin-covered, and has muscle-fibre attached to it.”[4]
FAUN FROM THE CAPITOLINE MUSEUM, SHOWING CERVICAL AURICLES.
Dr. Sutton further calls attention to the fact that on ancient statues of fauns and satyrs cervical auricles are sometimes found, and he figures the head of a satyr from the British Museum, carved long before the days of anatomy, where a sessile ear on the neck is most distinct. A still better illustration may be seen in the Art Museum at Boston on a full-sized cast of a faun belonging to the later Greek period; and there are other examples in the same building. One interest of these neck-ears in statues is that they are not as a rule modelled after the human ear but taken from the cervical ear of the goat, from which the general idea of the faun was derived. This shows that neck-ears were common on the goats of that period—as they are on goats to this day—but the sculptor would hardly have had the daring to introduce this feature in the human subject unless he had been aware that pathological facts encouraged him. The occurrence of these ears in goats is no more than one would expect. Indeed one would look for them not only in Man, but in all the Mammalia, for so far as their bodies are concerned all the higher animals are near relations. Observations on vestigial structures in animals are sadly wanting; but they are certainly found in the horse, pig, sheep, and others.
FORM OF THE EAR IN BABY OUTANG.—FROM “DARWIN AND AFTER DARWIN”
That the human ear was not always the squat and degenerate instrument it is at present may be seen by a critical glance at its structure. Mr. Darwin records how a celebrated sculptor called his attention to a little peculiarity in the external ear, which he had often noticed both in men and women. “The peculiarity consists in a little blunt point, projecting from the inwardly folded margin or helix. When present, it is developed at birth, and according to Professor Ludwig Meyer, more frequently in man than in woman. The helix obviously consists of the extreme margin of the ear folded inwards; and the folding appears to be in some manner connected with the whole external ear being permanently pressed backwards. In many monkeys who do not stand high in the order, as baboons and some species of macacus, the upper portion of the ear is slightly pointed, and the margin is not at all folded inwards; but if the margin were to be thus folded, a slight point would necessarily project towards the centre.”[5]
Here then, in this discovery of the lost tip of the ancestral ear, is further and visible advertisement of man’s Descent, a surviving symbol of the stirring times and dangerous days of his animal youth. It is difficult to imagine any other theory than that of Descent which could account for all these facts. That evolution should leave such clues lying about is at least an instance of its candor.
HORNED SHEEP AND GOAT WITH CERVICAL AURICLES.—FROM “EVOLUTION AND DISEASE,” J. BLAND-SUTTON.
But this does not exhaust the betrayals of this most confiding organ. If we turn from the outward ear to the muscular apparatus for working it, fresh traces of its animal career are brought to light. The erection of the ear, in order to catch sound better, is 56 a power possessed by almost all mammals, and the attached muscles are large and greatly developed in all but domesticated forms. This same apparatus, though he makes no use of it whatever, is still attached to the ears of Man. It is so long since he relied on the warnings of hearing, that by a well-known law the muscles have fallen into disuse and atrophied. In many cases, however, the power of twitching the ear is not wholly lost, and every school-boy can point to some one in his class who retains the capacity and is apt to revive it in irrelevant circumstances.
One might run over all the other organs of the human body and show their affinities with animal structures and an animal past. The twitching of the ear, for instance, suggests another obsolete or obsolescent power—the power, or rather the set of powers, for twitching the skin, especially the skin of the scalp and forehead by which we raise the eyebrows. Sub-cutaneous muscles for shaking off flies from the skin, or for erecting the hair of the scalp, are common among quadrupeds, and these are represented in the human subject by the still functioning muscles of the forehead, and occasionally of the head itself. Everyone has met persons who possess the power of moving the whole scalp to and fro, and the muscular apparatus for effecting it is identical with what is normally found in some of the Quadrumana.
Another typical vestigial structure is the plica semi-lunaris, the remnant of the nictitating membrane characteristic of nearly the whole vertebrate sub-kingdom. This membrane is a semi-transparent curtain which can be drawn rapidly across the external surface of the eye for the purpose of sweeping it clean. In birds it is extremely common, but it also exists in fish, mammals, and all the other vertebrates. Where it is not found of any functional value it is almost always represented by vestiges of some kind. In Man all that is left of it is a little piece of the curtain draped at the side of the eye.
When one passes from the head to the other extremity of the human body one comes upon a somewhat unexpected but very pronounced characteristic—the relic of the tail, and not only of the tail, but of muscles 57 for wagging it. Everyone who first sees a human skeleton is amazed at this discovery. At the end of the vertebral column, curling faintly outward in suggestive fashion, are three, four, and occasionally five vertebræ forming the coccyx, a true rudimentary tail. In the adult this is always concealed beneath the skin, but in the embryo, both in man and ape, at an early stage it is much longer than the limbs. What is decisive as to its true nature, however, is that even in the embryo of man the muscles for wagging it are still found. In the grown-up human being these muscles are represented by bands of fibrous tissue, but cases are known where the actual muscles persist through life. That a distinct external tail should not be still found in Man may seem disappointing to the evolutionist. But the want of a tail argues more for the theory of Evolution than its presence would have done. It would have been contrary to the Theory of Descent had he possessed a longer tail. For all the anthropoids most allied to Man have long since also parted with theirs.
It was formerly held that the entire animal creation had contributed something to the anatomy of Man, that as Serres expressed it “Human Organogenesis is a condensed Comparative Anatomy.” But though Man has not such a monopoly of the past as is here inferred—other types having here and there emerged and developed along lines of their own—it is certain that the materials for his body have been brought together from an unknown multitude of lowlier forms of life.
EAR OF BARBARY APE, CHIMPANZEE, AND MAN, SHOWING VESTIGIAL CHARACTERS OF THE HUMAN EAR.—FROM “DARWIN AND AFTER DARWIN.”
Those who know the Cathedral of St. Mark’s will remember how this noblest of the Stones of Venice owes its greatness to the patient hands of centuries and centuries of workers, how every quarter of the globe has been spoiled of its treasures to dignify this single shrine. But he who ponders over the more ancient temple of the human body will find imagination fail him as he tries to think from what remote and mingled sources, from what lands, seas, climates, atmospheres, its various parts have been called together, and by what innumerable contributory creatures, swimming, creeping, flying, climbing, each of its several members was wrought and perfected. What ancient chisel first sculptured the rounded columns of the limbs? What dead hands built the cupola of the brain, and from what older ruins were the scattered pieces of its mosaic-work brought? Who fixed the windows in its upper walls? What forgotten looms wove its tapestries and draperies? What winds and weathers wrought the strength into its buttresses? What ocean-beds and forest glades worked up the colors? What Love and Terror and Night called forth the Music? And what Life and 58 Death and Pain and Struggle put all together in the noiseless workshop of the past and removed each worker silently when its task was done? How these things came to be Biology is one long record. The architects and builders of this mighty temple are not anonymous. Their names, and the work they did, are graven forever on the walls and arches of the Human Embryo. For this is a volume of that Book in which Man’s members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.
