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The first time the question did come up Miss Payne was taking the subject, and she suggested that Adam and Eve were never in this country, which disposed of difficulties so well that I gave the same answer the only time I ever had to deal with the question. When we come to the problem of fire, we always use parts of Miss Dopp's story of The Tree-Dwellers.
When, gaining strength and coming to possess a more important place in the world, these ancient tree-dwellers were able to occupy the ground which of old had been possessed by the great reptiles, the limbs that had served well for an arboreal life had to undergo many changes in order to fit them for progression in the new realm.
Elevated watch-houses are placed near to the mountain fields, and it is possible that in times of great danger people might have had similar places of refuge in or near to their villages, but the old men emphatically deny that they were ever tree-dwellers, and there is nothing in the folk-tales to justify such a belief; on the contrary, the tales-indicate that the type of dwelling found to-day, was that of former times.
But you have been introduced to a good deal of Australia and heard much of its industries and its history. It is time now to talk of savages, and birds, and beasts, and games, and the like. A dwindling race; their curious weapons The Papuan tree-dwellers The cunning witch-doctors. The natives of Australia were always few in number.
We see the result only, we cannot trace the exact process; but we have as an outcome the adoption of a method of locomotion different from that of all other tree-dwellers, the forefoot developing into the hand with its opposable thumb, and the hindfoot gaining a similar grasping power in the toes.
At Posso, the next port on Celebes, we land a Dutch officer, bound for the important barracks on a hill above the straggling campong, after a successful expedition against the tree-dwellers, cannibals, and slave-traders of the interior, still sunk in barbarism.
The first digits, namely, the "great toe" and the "thumb," are freely movable and opposable to the others, so that the limbs are prehensile and clasping structures; usually but not always the animals of this order are tree-dwellers in correlation with the grasping powers of the feet and hands.
If we consider, for instance, the squirrels, one of the best-known groups of tree-living animals, we find them to be members of the great order of rodents, whose native habitat is the land surface. Though the squirrels have taken to the trees, there has been no adaptive change in the structure of their limbs and feet. The same may be said of almost all tree-dwellers except the lemurs and apes.
The details of our progress across the Peninsula could not be given here, but I will relate one of our first experiences with the tree-dwellers of Kelantan, when we were camped on the head-waters of the Lebah River in that province, where, I believe, no white man had ever been before.
This, my professor told me, was a racial memory. It dated back to our remote ancestors who lived in trees. With them, being tree-dwellers, the liability of falling was an ever-present menace. Many lost their lives that way; all of them experienced terrible falls, saving themselves by clutching branches as they fell toward the ground.
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