WHY A BABY CAN BE LIFIED BY ITS FINGERS.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VIII, Issue 733, 30 December 1914, Page 3

WHY A BABY CAN BE LIFIED BY ITS FINGERS.

A baby ten hours or ten days old is relatively stronger in its arms than it ever will be as a grown person—boy or girl. Let the infant grasp your forefinger or a pencil and it will hang on without apparent effort while you raise it free from any support. It will also bend the limbs on the thighs and assume a swinging motion. This is only one evidence of the lasting power of inborn habits and instinct persisting in the evolution of man. When man was in the primitive state where ape-like he lived among trees, the ability to firmly hold on to the "branches was of the utmost importance. This necessitated the development of a strong power of grip in the hands and muscular force in the arms.

In those days the mother nursed her baby as she does to-day— on one arm. But she was ever on the watch for enemies, and constantly fleeing them. When a tree-climbing animal, such as a leopard, approached to kill for food, the ape mother would need all her hands to go from branch to branch. Now the little baby must hold on in some way the best it could. It would grasp the mother round the neck or twine its little finger in her long hair and literally hang for life.

These babies were almost as helpless as are those of to-day, being unable to stand or in any way move except by clinging to the. mother. This condition of the ape babies existed for years and years —we cannot measure the lapse of time this trait was exercised.

As throughout all the epochs of evolution it is probably that only the fit survived. That is, when any ape baby lacked the ability to cling with its fingers and arms it fell a prey to the agile foe. Those surviving have passed down to us to-day-the evidence of their arboreal instincts when the infant of a few hours will cling to aar finger, to a beard, or a stick places in touch with its hands. It is these little things which show us facts in the history of the development of man that are now being studied and which bring us nearer to the wonderful forces controlling the progress of mind and soul. Perhaps it is unfortunate that we did not continue to develop that peculiar strength of the gri>) in extreme infancy. If we had, no doubt we would have been able to do almost double the manual labor in maturity, having double the strength.