Man is a vertebrate animal. This means that he has a locomotive, not protective, skeleton, composed of cartilage—a tough, elastic, organic material, hardened, as a rule, by the deposition of mineral salts, mainly phosphate of lime, in exceedingly fine particles, so as to form a homogeneous, flawless, elastic, tough, light, and unyielding skeleton, held together by firm ligaments.
The skeleton is internal, and this fact, as we have seen, gives the possibility of large size. And size is in itself no unimportant factor. Professor Lotze maintains that without man's size and strength, agriculture and the working of metals, and thus all civilization, would have been impossible. But we have already seen that there is an extreme of size, e.g., in the elephant, which makes its possessor clumsy, able to exist only where there are large amounts of food in limited areas, slow to reproduce, and lacking in adaptability. This extreme also is avoided in man; in this, as in many other particulars, he holds the golden mean. But we have also seen that large size is, as a rule, correlated with long life and great opportunity for experience and observation. And these are the foundations of intelligence. Hence the deliverance of the higher vertebrate, and especially of man, from any iron-bound subjection to instinct.
And here another question of vital importance meets us. Is man's life at present as long as it should or can be? The question is exceedingly difficult, but a negative answer seems more probable. We cannot but hope that, with a better knowledge of our physical structure, a clearer vision of the dangers to which we are exposed, more study of the laws of physiology, heredity, and of our environment, and above all, less reckless disregard of these in a mad pursuit of pleasure, wealth, and position, man's period of mature, healthy, and best activity may be lengthened, perhaps, even a score of years. The mitigation of hurry and worry alone, the two great curses of our American civilization, might postpone the collapse of our nervous systems longer than we even dream. And if we could add even five years to the working life of our statesmen, scholars, and discoverers, the work of these last five years, with the advantage of all previously acquired knowledge and experience, might be of more value than that of their whole previous life. Human advance could not but be greatly, or even vastly, accelerated.
Moreover, we have seen that the history of vertebrates is really the history of the development of the cerebrum, forebrain or large brain, as we call it in man. This is the seat in man of consciousness, thought, and will. This portion as a distinct and new lobe first appears in lowest vertebrates, increases steadily in size from class to class, reaches its most rapid development by mammals, and its culmination in man. During the tertiary period—the last of the great geological periods—the brain in many groups of mammals increased in size, both absolutely and relatively, eight to tenfold. Dr. Holmes says, that the education of a child should begin a century or two before its birth; man really began his mental education at least as early as the appearance of vertebrate life.
But man is a mammal. This means that every organ is at its best. The digestive system, while making but a small part of the weight of the body, and built mainly on the old plan, is wonderfully perfect in its microscopic details. The muscles are heavy and powerful, arranged with the weight near the axis of the body, and replaced near the ends of the appendages by light, tough sinews. The higher mammal is this compact, light, and agile. The skeleton is strong, and the levers of the appendages are fitted to give rapidity of motion even at the expense of strength. And this again is possible only because of the high development and strength of the muscles. Moreover, the highest mammals are largely arboreal, and in connection with this habit have changed the foreleg into an arm and hand. The latter became the servant of the brain and gave the possibility of using tools.
But increase in size and activity, and the expense of producing each new individual, led to the adoption of placental development. And the mammal is so complex, the road from the egg to the fully developed young is so long, that a long period of gestation is necessary. And even at birth the brain, especially of man, is anything but complete. Hence the necessity of the mammalian habit of suckling and caring for the young. And this feebleness and dependence of the young had begun far below man to draw out maternal tenderness and affection. And the mammalian mode of reproduction and care of young led to a more marked difference and interdependence between the sexes.
The result of this is man's family life, as Mr. John Fiske has shown so beautifully in that fascinating monograph, "The Destiny of Man." And family life once introduced becomes the foundation and bulwark of all civilization, morality, and religion. Far down in the mammalian series, before the development of the family, maternal education has become prominent, and the young begins life, benefited by the experiences of the parent. How much more efficient is this in family life. But, furthermore, the family is perhaps the first, certainly the most important, of those higher unities in which men are bound together. Social life of a sort undoubtedly existed, before man, among birds, insects, and lower mammals. The community was often defective or incomplete in unity, or existed under such limitations that it could not show its best results, but that it was of vast benefit from an even higher than mere physical standpoint, no one will, I think, deny. But with the family a new era of education and social life began.
First of all, the struggle for existence is thereby greatly modified and mitigated. This crowding out and trampling down of the weaker by the stronger is transferred, to a certain extent, from the individual to the family and, in great degree, from the family to larger and larger social units. For within the limits of the family competition tends to be replaced by mutual helpfulness, and not only are the loneliness and horror of the struggle between isolated individuals banished, but, what is vastly more, the family becomes the school of unselfishness and love. And what has thus become true of the single family, and groups of nearly related families, is slowly being realized in the larger units of communities and states. For, as families and communities are just as really organisms as are the individual men and women, whose soundness depends upon the healthy activity of every organ, so there is a survival, first of families, then of communities and rival civilizations, in proportion to their unity and soundness in every part. For on account of the close bonds of family and social life, and in connection with the development of articulate speech, a new kind of heredity, so to speak, arises, of vast importance for both good and evil. This mental and moral heredity, over-leaping all boundaries of blood and natural kinship, spreads light and good influence or an immoral contagion through the community. And thus, in sheer self-defence, society passes laws setting limits to the oppression of the poor and weak, lest, degraded and brutalized, they become breeding centres of physical and moral disease in the community. The positive lesson that the surest mode of self-defence is the elevation of these submerged classes, we are just beginning to learn and apply.
By the ever-increasing acceleration of the development the gap between man and the lower animal widens with wonderful rapidity. Of course it is only in man, and higher man, that these last and highest results of mammalian structure appear. But that, far removed as they are, they are the results of mammalian and vertebrate characteristics cannot, I think, be well denied. And this is only one of innumerably possible illustrations of the fact that all our most highly prized institutions are rooted far back in our ancestry, often ineradicably in the very organs of our bodies. And thus evolution, which many view only from its radical side—and it has a radical side—is really the conservative bulwark of all that is essentially worth possessing in the past.
But every factor in man's development tends toward intellectual and spiritual development. Man's vast increase of brain; his finely balanced body; his upright gait; setting his hands free from the work of locomotion that they might become the skilful servants of the mind; finally, articulate speech and social, and, above all, family, life, all tended in this same direction.