In external appearances the man-like races differ from men in having a luxuriant covering of natural hair. But anthropoids differ very much among themselves in this particular. The orang, usually covered with long hair, is sometimes almost hairless. There are, too, races of human beings whose bodies are covered with a considerable growth of hair. The Todas (Australians) and Ainus (aborigines of Japan) are noted for the hairiness of their bodies, certain individuals among them being covered with a real fur, especially on the lower limbs.[3]
Individuals also often appear in every race with a remarkable development of the hair. Adrian and his son Fedor, exhibited years ago over Europe as ‘dog-men,’ are examples. The father was completely covered with a thick growth of fine dirty-yellow hair two or three inches long. Long tufts grew out of his nostrils and ears, giving him a striking resemblance to a Skye terrier. Fedor, and also his sister, were covered with hair like the father, but another son was like ordinary men. The man-like races have also longer arms in proportion to the height of the body than man generally has. But this is also true of human infants and negroes. The gibbon has relatively much longer arms than the other anthropoids. It differs from the chimpanzee in this respect more than the chimpanzee differs from man. When standing upright and reaching down with the middle finger, the gibbon can touch its foot, while the chimpanzee can reach only to the knee. Man ordinarily reaches part way down the thigh, but negroes have been known to have arms reaching to the knee-pan.[4]
The skeleton of the African races contains many characters recognised by osteologists as ‘pithecoid,’ or ape-like. It is massive, the flat bones are thick, and the pelvis narrow. In the manlike apes the large toe is opposable to the other four, and is used by them much as the thumb is used. But this difference between the two races of beings is just what might be expected from the differences in their modes of life. Man has little need of this opposability on account of his exclusively terrestrial life, while to the ape it is indispensable on account of his arboreal environment and life. ‘But there are,’ says Haeckel, ‘wild tribes of men who can oppose the large toe to the other four just as if it were a thumb, and even new-born infants of the most highly-developed races of men can grasp as easily with their hind-hands as with their forehands. Chinese boatmen row with their feet, and Bengal workmen weave with them. The negro, in whom the big toe is freely movable, seizes hold of the branches of trees with it when climbing, just like the four-handed apes’.[5]
Many men have lost their arms by accident and have learned to use their feet as hands with wonderful skill. Not many years ago there died in Europe an armless violinist who had during his lifetime played to cultured audiences in most of the capitals of the world. Some of the most accomplished of penmen hold their pen between their toes. The man-like apes live to about the same age as man, and all of them, like man, have beards. The anthropoid beard, too, like the human, appears at the age of sexual maturity. The human beard often differs in colour from the hair of the scalp, and whenever it does it has been observed to be invariably lighter—never darker—than the hair on the scalp. This is true among all races of men. The same rule and the same uniformity exists among anthropoids. The races of mankind are divided into two primary groups depending upon the shape of the head and the character of the hair: the short-headed races (Brachycephali), such as the Malays, Mongols, and Aryans, with round or oval faces, straight hair, and vertical profiles; and the long-headed races (Dolichocephali), with woolly hair and prognathous faces, such as the Papuans and Africa races. The skin of the short-headed races is orange or white, while the skin and hair of the long-headed races are glossy black.
It is, at least, interesting that the orang and gibbon, who live in Asia and its islands, where the brachycephalic races of men supposedly arose, are themselves brachycephalic; and that the gorilla and chimpanzee, who live in Africa, where the dolichocephalic races chiefly live, are dolichocephalic. The gorilla and chimpanzee also have, like the men and women of Africa, black skin and hair; while the hair of the orang is a reddish-brown, and its skin sometimes yellowish-white. The dentition of the anthropoids and men is in all essentials identical. They all have two sets of teeth: a set of milk-teeth, twenty in number, and thirty-two permanent teeth, the permanents consisting of two incisors, one canine, two premolars, and three molars, in each half-jaw. Man has ordinarily twelve pairs of ribs and thirty-two vertebrae. So has the orang. The other anthropoids have thirteen pairs of ribs. But the number of ribs in both human and anthropoid beings is not uniform, man occasionally having thirteen pairs, and the gorilla fourteen. Man has also the same number of caudal vertebrae in his rudimentary tail as the anthropoid has. The hands and feet of anthropoids, bone for bone and muscle for muscle, correspond with those of men, no greater structural differences existing than among different species of men. The human foot has three muscles not found in the human hand—a short flexor muscle, a short extensor muscle, and a long muscle extending from the fibula to the foot. All of these muscles are found in the anthropoid foot just as in the foot of man. There are also the same differences between the arrangement of the bones of the anthropoid wrist and ankle as between the wrist and ankle bones of man. Whatever set of anatomical particulars may be selected, whether it be hands, arms, feet, muscles, skull, viscera, ribs, or dentition, it is found that the anthropoid races and men are in all essentials the same. The differences are such as have arisen as a result of different modes of life, and such as exist between different tribes of either group of animals.
‘The structural differences which separate man from the gorilla and chimpanzee,’ says Huxley, in summing up the conclusion of his brilliant inquiry into ‘Man’s Place in Nature,’ ‘are not so great as those which separate the gorilla from the lower apes.’
‘The body of man and that of the anthropoid are not only peculiarly similar,’ says Haeckel, ‘but they are practically one and the same in every important respect. The same two hundred bones, in the same order and structure, make up our inner skeleton; the same three hundred muscles effect our movements; the same hair clothes our skin; the same four-chambered heart is the central pulsometer in our circulation; the same thirty-two teeth are set in the same order in our jaws; the same salivary, hepatic, and gastric glands compass our digestion; the same reproductive organs insure the maintenance of our race’.[6]
‘Not being able,’ says Owen in his paper on ‘The Characters of Mammalia,’ ‘to appreciate or conceive of the distinction between the psychical phenomena of a chimpanzee and of a Boschisman or of an Aztec with arrested brain-growth, as being of a nature so essential as to preclude a comparison between them, or as being other than a difference in degree, I cannot shut my eyes to the significance of that all-pervading similitude of structure—every tooth, every bone, strictly homologous—which makes the determination of the difference between Homo and Pithecus the anatomist’s difficulty.’
‘If before the appearance of man on the earth,’ says Ward in his ‘Dynamic Sociology,’ ‘an imaginary painter had visited it, and drawn a portrait embodying the thorax of the gibbon, the hands and feet of the gorilla, the form and skull of the chimpanzee, the brain development of the orang, and the countenance of Semnopithecus, giving to the whole the average stature of all of these apes, the result would have been a being not far removed from our conception of the primitive man, and not widely different from the actual condition of certain low tribes of savages. The brain development would perhaps be too low for the average of any existing tribe, and would correspond better with that of certain microcephalous idiots and cretins, of which the human race furnishes many examples.’
And it is not true, as is commonly supposed, that, after all other resemblances between the human and anthropoid structures have been made out, there still exists somewhere some undistinguishable difference in the organic structure of their brains. All differences in structure from time to time suspected or asserted to exist between the brain of man and that of the man-like apes have been one after another completely swept away. And it is now known to all neurologists that the human and anthropoid brains differ structurally in no particulars whatever, both of them containing the same lobes, the same ventricles and cornua, and the same convolutional outline. Even the posterior lobe, the posterior cornu, and the hippocampus minor, so long triumphantly asserted to be characteristic features of the human brain, have been pitilessly identified in all anthropoids by the profound and terrible Huxley. There is not an important fold or fissure in the brain of man that is not found in the brain of the anthropoid. ‘The surface of the brain of a monkey,’ says Huxley, ‘exhibits a sort of skeleton map of man’s, and in the man-like apes the details become more and more filled in, until it is only in minor characters that the chimpanzee’s or the orang’s brain can be structurally distinguished from man’s’.[7]