OUR GORILLA. COUSINS.
[TO THE EDITOR Or THE " SPECTATOR.") Sul,—In your last issue you ask how "could a gorilla without a hairy skin be better fitted for survival than a gorilla with one," and why therefore, on Darwinian principles, man has not a hairy skin? May I offer two remarks on this point? First, it is not probable that man is descended from the gorilla at all. It is more likely that man and the gorilla have a common ancestor,—in fact, that they are connected, not by a straight line, but by an angle. This, however, is of minor importance, as some remote ancestor of man mast have been hairy. The second and chief point which I would notice is that, in the transmutation of species, very many effects must be referred to what, if I may remember right, Mr. Darwin has called "spontaneous variation" and "cor- relation of growth." For instance, deafness in cats is said to be linked in some unexplained way with white hair and blue eyes. Let us suppose that, from a species of such white cats, an un- sightly species of oats of a different colour was shown to have been developed. A casual observer might wonder how natural selection could be concerned to develop ugly cats from handsome ones. But it would afterwards appear that what nature had done was to cure the species of its deafness, but that, in doing this, she had to rob it of its white skin and blue oyes. In short, any important change, however beneficial in a race of highly organised beings, tends to involve accidental changes which have no direct or apparent benefit. If so, the prodigious change from monkey to man must have been accompanied by a vast number of such accidental changes. Of these minor changes, why should not the loss of a hairy coat be one? In other words, is it more ante- cedently unlikely that a hairy coat should be somehow unfavour- able to the highest simian or semi-human development, than that a white skin and blue eyes should be unfavourable to feline hearing ?—I am, Sir, &c.,
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