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have a firm hold upon the hairy coat of its tree-climbing mother. When the newborn child hangs in this way, it bends its curved lower limbs so that the soles of the feet are turned toward one another, thus increasing its resemblance to the ape. Let us realize that these curious relics found in so many places in the framework of man are not unique, and that they are reduced counterparts of larger and more valuable structures in the ape. Unless evolution is true, they have absolutely no sensible reasons for existence. Science prefers the evolutionary explanation of their occurrence because this explanation is more in harmony with the facts known about other organisms, and it is more reasonable than any other. * * * * * When we dealt with the general doctrine of natural transformation, it appeared that the evidence of embryology was in many respects more cogent and conclusive than that derived from the comparative study of animal structures. In the case of man, as before, no one could demand any surer or more convincing proof that an organic mechanism with one structure can change into an organic mechanism with a different structure, than the obvious facts of development. The embryo, which is not an infant or an adult, becomes an infant which must work its way onward by the gradual accumulation of slight changes here and there and everywhere in its anatomy, until it becomes mature. Each and every one of us has actually undergone the process of organic change in becoming what we are, and we cannot deny the reality of such a process without challenging the evidence of our senses. When the full import of this history is realized, and when we look further into the nature of these preliminary conditions through which the human organism passes in development, we are forcibly impressed by other facts than the one to which I have directed your attention, for not only do we find natural transformation, as in the other mammals, but the embryonic stages are marvelously similar to the earlier conditions in other mammals. Not very long before birth the human embryo is strikingly similar to the embryo of the ape; still earlier, it presents an appearance very like that of the embryos of other mammals lower in the scale, like the cat and the rabbit,--forms which comparative anatomy independently holds to be more remote relatives of the human species. Indeed, as we trace back the still earlier histor
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