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Time and Change by John Burroughs
page 30 of 224 (13%)
along his line he picked up the four-chambered heart, the warm
blood, the placenta, the diaphragm, the plantigrade foot, the
mammary glands--indeed, what has he not picked up on the long road
of his many transformations? He left some of his superfluous
forty-four teeth with his ancestral quadrumana of Eocene times, and
kept thirty-two. He picked up his brain somewhere on the road,
probably far back in Palaeozoic times, but how has he developed and
enlarged it, till it is now the one supreme thing in the world! His
fear, his cunning, his anger, his treachery, his hoggishness--all
his animal passions--he brought with him from his animal ancestors;
but his moral and spiritual nature, his altruism, his veneration,
his religious emotions, his aesthetic perceptions--have come to him
as a man, supplementing his lower nature, as it were, with another
order of senses--a finer sight, a finer touch, wrought in him by the
discipline of life, and the wonder of the world about him, beginning
de novo in him only as the wing began de novo in the bird, or the
color began de novo in the flower--struck out from preexisting
potentialities. The father of the eye is the light, and the father
of the ear is the vibration of the air, but the father of man's
higher nature is a question of quite another sort. About the only
thing in his physical make-up that man can call his own is his chin.
None of the orders below him seem to have what can strictly be
called a chin.

Man owes his five toes and five fingers to the early amphibians of
the sub-carboniferous times. The first tangible evidence of these
five toes upon the earth is, to me, very interesting. The earliest
record of them that I have heard of is furnished by a slab of shale
from Pennsylvania, upon which, while it was yet soft mud, our first
five-toed ancestor had left the imprint of his four feet. He was
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