THE HUMAN SIDE OF APES
By Samuel Jackson Holmes
Professor of Zoölogy in the University of California
For some peculiar reason the animal kingdom includes several kinds of creatures that are remarkably like us in a great many ways. Everyone has noticed the amusing resemblances between apes and men, but few are aware of the numerous and close similarities between them that are revealed by a thorough comparative study. Bone for bone, muscle for muscle, nerve for nerve, we are remarkably close counterparts of our anthropoid relatives. Even in the structure of the brain, which is, perhaps, our most distinctive anatomical peculiarity, there is, as Prof. G. Elliot Smith has remarked, no essential difference, except in degree of development, between ape and man. To be sure, we have a much larger brain, and the so-called association areas are more extensively developed, but in brain structure we differ less from the higher apes than these differ from the lower members of the monkey tribe.
Now mental development and brain development are closely tied together. We stand far above the apes in the development of our minds, and no one is wise enough to gauge the degree of our mental superiority from a study of the structure of the brain. A comparative study of brains, however, would lead us to infer that the ape stands nearer than any other animal to man in mental endowment. And this inference is abundantly justified. Nevertheless, the gap
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