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Updated: June 21, 2025
A perfectly similar appendage, "a most delicate tube or ribbon," was found by Darwin in free-swimming pupae of Lepas australis on the last joints of the "prehensile antennae."
Viewing him generally as an artist, and calling to mind a more famous type, we see that Wagner is not at all unlike Demosthenes: in him also we have the terrible earnestness of purpose and that strong prehensile mind which always obtains a complete grasp of a thing; in him, too, we have the hand's quick clutch and the grip as of iron.
It is a prehensile foot, if you will, but is in no sense a hand: it is a foot which differs from that of Man in no fundamental character, but in mere proportions degree of mobility and secondary arrangement of its parts. "It must not be supposed, however, that because I speak of these differences as not fundamental, that I wish to underrate their value.
After penetrating for I should think upwards of two miles, sometimes up to our knees in miry clay, and often stopped by impassable barriers of wild vines and other prehensile plants, which annoyed us greatly, and made me regret a thousand times that I had courted such dangers and inconveniences, the sound of two rifle-shots threw the whole party into indescribable commotion.
Apes and other tree-climbing creatures must not only adjust their prehensile organ to a wide variety of distances and sizes of branches, but must use the hands more or less freely for picking, transporting, and eating fruit; and this has probably been a prime factor in lifting man to the erect position, without which human intelligence as we know it could have hardly been possible.
His fingers gripped each branch as firmly as if they had been iron clamps; his feet, encumbered by the stout boots, seemed to catch hold and cling to the slightest irregularities of the smooth bark as skilfully and tenaciously as if they had been the prehensile paws of a cat; not a touch of vertigo troubled him; he felt as fearless and splendidly alive as when he climbed tall trees for buzzards' eggs thirty-three years ago.
We may see human-like forms, the quadrumana clinging among the high branches, and leaping from tree to tree, like birds upon the wing; we may see them of many shapes, sizes, and colours, from the great howling monkeys, with their long prehensile tails, down to the little saimiris and ouistitis not larger than squirrels. What beautiful birds, too! for this forest is their favourite home.
Already I was accustomed to the thought that she still lived, and to the big heart she had set beating in my feeble frame; already the continued existence of these villains, with the first dim inkling of their villainy, was ceasing to be a novelty in a brain now quickened and prehensile beyond belief.
Habit, and this almost implies that some benefit, great or small, is thus derived, would in all probability suffice for the work." If, then, habit can do this and it is no small thing to develop a wonderfully perfect prehensile organ which can serve as a fifth hand how much more may not habit do, even though unaided, as Mr.
They had dressed it up now, and hid some of its strangeness; but each morning the nurse would undress it, and give it a bath; and then he marvelled at the short crooked legs, and the tiny red hands that clutched incessantly at the air, and the strange prehensile feet, that carried one back to distant ages, hinting at the secrets of Nature's workshop.
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