It was with some trepidation that the members of the Royal Anthropo logical Institute attended their special meeting to hear an address on "Tailed Men" by Professor Arthur Keith. The title embodied a portent and possibly a disappoint. ment. Have we tails now, did we ever have them, and if we had them and lost them how did it happen? Professor Keith thoroughly reassured the adherents to the Royal Anthropological Institate.
Every human embryo has an embryonic tail, but in the overwhelm. ing majority of cases it disappears at a very early stage. Very occisionally the tail survives in every species of the human race, and a specimen has been presented to the Institute by Dr. MoLachlan, of Halifax, Yorks., who removed it from a three-months-old female. The appendage is simply a matter of muscles, without bones or vertebra. It began to disappear at about the beginning of the Tertian Period, when monkeys divided themselves into the pronogrades, who ran on all fours, and the orthogrades, who were upright and depended more on their arms than their legs. The gibbon (the most primitive of all, whose remains have been found in ancient Egypt), the ourang, the chimpanzee, the gorilla, and man, said the lecturer, have all lost their tails, and the loss is to be traced to the moment when certain monkeys began to walk upstanding.
It was with a sigh of relief that the ant agists learned that they had not been defrauded: of their birthright.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.