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The main arguments in favour of it appear to him to be the general ones; the homologies and analogies revealed by comparative morphology and physiology, the ascending series in the palæontological record, vestigial organs, parasitic degeneration, the origin of those vital associations which we call consortism and symbiosis.
If we only knew enough, we would, no doubt, discover a beneficial use for all the so-called vestigial organs. Our ignorance is no argument against the wisdom of their creation. The claim that human hair is vestigial is spoiled by the fact that there is none on the back where most abundant on simians.
We might take a very large number of parts of the actual human body, and discover that they are similar historical or archaeological monuments surviving in a modern system, but we have space only for a few of the more conspicuous. The hair on the body is a vestigial organ, of actual use to no race of men, an evident relic of the thick warm coat of an earlier ancestor.
You will presently become bald perhaps as bald as Thomas Hobbes was for a vigilant and active soul invariably compels baldness, so close are the relations between the soul and the brain, and so destructive are the growth and operations of the soul to those vestigial features which humanity has inherited from those grosser animals, our prehistoric ancestors."
And if it does not represent a reduced counterpart of the tails of other mammals, what does it represent? Many of the vestigial structures of man appear more clearly in infancy and in embryonic development. The human embryo possesses a complete coat of hair, called the lanugo, which usually disappears before birth.
But it is unnecessary to invoke any vestigial inheritance from a vastly remote past when we bear in mind that the innervation of these two adjoining regions is inevitably very closely related.
Examining the structure of man more closely, we find this strong suggestion of relationship greatly confirmed. It is now well known that the human body contains a number of vestigial "organs" organs of no actual use, and only intelligible as vestiges of organs that were once useful.
The hostility is too widespread, however, and too uniform in occurrence for us to suppose that it has no root in the inherited constitution of the bird; and if it served some useful purpose in the past, the instinct might still persist, so long as it were not harmful. Thus the view that the behaviour is vestigial is not perhaps unreasonable.
They persuade their followers, among whom are many ignorant consumers, that this vestigial remnant of the old Pragam policy is all that keeps the nation from being desolated by small-pox and an epidemic of broken legs. It is impossible within these limits to give a full history of the strange delusion whose origin I have related.
He saw boats and cars and a few long-nosed airplanes, with the merest trace of vestigial wings far back near the empennage, streaking through the sky in high arcs, leaving curling trails of fog and smoke behind them. But there was little here that his world had not already mastered or at least had on the drawing board. The Nebula came to rest upon a bare plain not far from the nearest city.
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