ed with the
Moslem conquest of Spain, of how Roderick, the last of the Gothic kings,
when in trouble and worry, repaired to an old castle, in the secret
recesses of which was a magic table whereon would pass in grim
procession the different events of the future of Spain; as he gazed on
the enchanted table he there saw his own ruin and his country's and
nation's subjugation. Anatomy is generally called a dry study, but, like
the enchanted brazen table in the ancient Gothic castle, it tells a no
less weird or interesting tale of the past. Its revelations lighten up a
long vista, through the thousands of years through which the human
species has evolved from its earliest appearance on earth, gradually
working up through the different evolutionary processes to what is
to-day supposed to be the acme of perfection as seen in the
Indo-European and Semitic races of man. Anatomy points to the
rudiment--still lingering, now and then still appearing in some one man
and without a trace in the next--of that climbing muscle which shows man
in the past either nervously escaping up the trunk of a tree in his
flight from many of the carnivorous animals with whom he was
contemporary, or, as the shades of night were beginning to gather
around him, we again see him by the aid of these muscles leisurely
climbing up to some hospitable fork in the tree, where the robust habits
of the age allowed him to find a comfortable resting-place; protected
from the dew of the night by the overhanging branches and from the
prowling hyena by the height of the tree, he passed the night in
security. The now useless ear-muscles, as well as the equally useless
series of muscles about the nose, also tell us of a movable, flapping
ear capable of being turned in any direction to catch the sound of
approaching danger, as well as of a movable and dilated nostril that
scented danger from afar,--the olfactory sense at one time having a
different function and more essential to life than that of merely noting
the differential aroma emitted by segars or cups of Mocha or Java, and
the ear being then used for some more useful purpose than having its
tympanum tortured by Wagnerian discordant sounds. Our ancestors might
not have been a very handsome set, nor, judging from the Neanderthal
skull, could they have had a very winning physiognomy, but they were a
very hardy and self-reliant set of men. Nature--always careful that
nothing should interfere with the procreative func