content with the supply of fruits which he gathers from the garden of nature, nor with the precariousness of the showers of heaven which water them. He plants his own vineyards, and waters them when necessary. He is not satisfied by merely hunting his prey, like carnivorous animals, but has invented a far-reaching plan of domesticating certain animals, on which he can feast at leisure without waste of material. He not only recognises the physical cause of a given effect in his environment, but often adjusts the cause so as to produce the effect at will. Instead of being entirely controlled by nature, he to a considerable extent controls the operations of nature by taking means to counteract them.
Erect Posture.
In the address which I had the honour of delivering in 1893, as President of the Anthropological Section of the British Association for that year, I advocated the hypothesis that the origin of the higher mental manifestations of man was primarily due to the attainment of the erect attitude, which, by entirely relieving the fore limbs of their primary function as locomotive organs, afforded him the opportunity of entering on a new phase of existence, in which intelligence and mechanical skill became henceforth the governing factors. With the completion of the morphological changes involved in the attainment of this attitude, the evolution of the present human form, with the exception of some remarkable modifications in the skull and facial bones which will shortly be described, was practically completed.[1]
As soon as bipedal locomotion became habitual and firmly secured on an anatomical basis, it does not appear that the osseous characters of the lower limbs would be sensibly affected by any subsequent increase in the quantity or quality
- ↑ It is unnecessary here to dwell on the anatomical alterations brought about in the human body in consequence of the attainment of the erect attitude, especially in the fore and hind limbs, which ended by converting the former into true hands, and the latter into organs for bipedal locomotion, as the details may be found in many of the publications on human anatomy Besides my own address above referred to (republished in Prehistoric Problems, chap. ii.), I would refer readers to Professor Goodsir's lectures on the Dignity of Man, and especially to Sir W. Turner's address as President of the Anthropological Section of the British Association for 1897.
