s features
of the muscular and other internal organs. The abnormality of club-foot
may be pointed to as a reversion to the shape of the foot in the
anthropoid apes. This, however, is a retention of a condition existing
in the foetus of man, the foot being drawn up and the sole turned inward
and upward. It is simply a passing testimony to the ancestral condition
of man.

Again, we have the fact that man possesses normally only twelve ribs,
one less than is found in the gorilla and the chimpanzee. This leads to
the possibility that man may have lost a rib in his development, and in
significant evidence of this is the fact that occasionally a thirteenth
rib appears in the human framework.

The functionless organs in men are, as above said, closely analogous to
the fossils in the rocks, in that both point back to a period in which
they were active, vital forms occupying a definite place in the long
line of animal life or animal structure. The argument that God directly
created the fossils is no more absurd than the one that He directly
created these useless and at times detrimental organs. It is impossible
to offer a reason for such a futile exercise of creative power, unless
that it was intended to make it falsely appear that man arose from the
world of life below him. Will any one in this age assert that God placed
useless and dangerous structures in the body of man for the incredible
purpose of deceiving him in regard to his origin? And will it be further
asserted that the Deity placed similar stumbling-blocks to the human
reason in the embryo, in order to deceive those who should extend their
researches to this low level? It would be difficult to conceive of a
more preposterous idea, yet there is no other escape from what seems a
self-evident fact, that man is a product of evolution from the lower
animals, and bears the marks of his ancestry thick upon him.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: "On the Air Bladder of Fishes." Proceedings of the Academy
of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, 1885.]

[Footnote 2: Sutton, "Evolution and Disease."]

III

RELICS OF ANCIENT MAN

If now, instead of seeking for evidences of man's ancestry within the
human body, in survivals of ancient anatomical structures, we seek for
them within the crust of the earth, we find ourselves confronted with
evidences of a great antiquity of the human race, partly in implements
of human manufacture, partly in ancient or fossilized bones of prim