power. It does not seem difficult to comprehend, from this point of view, how the feet of a five-toed plantigrade animal may in time have developed into grasping organs, since there would be required only an increased flexibility of the joints, and a wider and fuller movement of the great toes. That such a change took place in this instance the facts appear to indicate, the most simple and probable explanation of the development of the grasping power in the hands and feet of the ape being seemingly that given above.

The relation of the lemurs to the apes is not clearly defined. It may be an ancestral one, or the two animals may represent distinct lines of descent. In the latter case we would have two lines of animal evolution in which the grasping power was gained and adaptation to arboreal life completed. Whatever their relationship, they both possess the opposable thumb as the hall-mark of their arboreal habitat, and whenever found walking on the ground they may be looked upon as estrays from their native place of residence.

Once the grasping power was gained, the first step of change from the quadrupedal to the semi-erect attitude was completed. The process may have begun in the effort to fit the sole of the foot to the rounded surface of boughs; or its first stage may have been in the seizing of overhead branches with the flexible hand; or both influences may have acted simultaneously. We see the result only, we cannot trace the exact process; but we have as an outcome the adoption of a method of locomotion different from that of all other tree-dwellers, the forefoot developing into the hand with its opposable thumb, and the hindfoot gaining a similar grasping power in the toes.