CREATION BY EVOLUTION
and as it is ordinarily lost before birth it must be regarded as a vestigial organ, purely embryonic in its history. Its occasional retention after birth gives rise to the hairy men and women of the museums and the side-shows.
Man, both in his embryonic and his adult state, possesses an abundance of vestigial organs. In fact, students of this subject who have tabulated these parts have attributed to the human being almost a hundred such organs, and though some of these may on further investigation prove not to be true examples of vestigial parts, most of them certainly fall into this class, so that man may be said to be rich in organs of this kind.
The brief survey that has just been made shows that vestigial organs are widely distributed throughout the animal kingdom, and that they may be abundantly present in a given species, such as man. Their evolutionary significance has long been a matter of comment. If animals were specially created why should there be included in their bodies parts that are quite useless and often in fact positively detrimental to them? Why, for instance, should man possess a system of functionless muscles for his external ear, a useless hairy covering before birth, and a worse than useless vermiform appendix? No advocate of the theory of special creation has ever been able to give a satisfactory answer to these questions. To those who believe in special creation the presence of vestigial organs has proved a stumbling block that they have never been able to avoid. In fact, the occurrence of organs of this type has always been an insuperable obstacle to the acceptance of this view of the production of organic species.
From an evolutionist’s standpoint, on the other hand, vestigial organs are precisely what should be expected. They are organs in process of disappearance. In the course of evo-
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