“How many people have ever taken notice of a baby’s foot, except to admire its pinkiness and its prettiness?” said he.  “And yet, to the anatomist, it is a revelation.  Take, for example, the feet of a child of ten months, that has never walked nor stood alone.  It has a power of grasping to some extent, and is used instinctively like a hand.  The great toe has a certain independent working, like a thumb, and the wrinkles of the sole resemble those of the palm.  These markings disappear when the pedal extremity has come to be employed for purposes of support.

“The hands and feet of a human being are strikingly like those of the chimpanzee in conformation, while the gorilla’s resemblance to man in these respects is even more remarkable.  The higher apes have been classified as ‘quadrumana,’ or ‘four-handed,’ because their hind feet are hand-shaped; but this designation is improperly applied, because the ape’s posterior extremities are not really hands at all.  They merely look like hands at the first glance, whereas, in fact, they are but feet adapted for climbing.  The big toes cannot be ‘opposed’ to other toes, as thumbs are to the fingers, but simply act pincer-wise, for the purpose of grasping.  Now, oddly enough, the ‘infant’s’ feet have this same power of grasping, pincer-fashion, and the action is performed in precisely the same way.  Advocates of evolutionary theories take this to signify that the human foot was originally utilized for climbing trees also, before the species was so highly developed as it is now.  Also, they assert that the fact that the art of walking erect is learned by the child with such difficulty proves that the race has only acquired it recently.

“There, darling,” he said, “you see how it is.  We have but come into possession of a little ape!  What shall we do?”

She was not troubled.  In his eyes she saw that which is worth more to the young mother than all else the world can give, but she entered into the spirit of his mood.  She replied, gently, that she didn’t know what to do, but had he the bad taste to kiss an Ape?  And he admitted that he had, and kissed the object gently, as if afraid of breaking it, and kissed the gentle mother a hundred to one.

I liked the Ape—­for so they came to allude to that sturdy babe.  He may be my heir some day—­though he was named, as Jean insisted, for his father—­and I had many a frolic with him in his babyhood, when I was allowed to enter the sanctuary of that home.  He was a little viking, a little raider, this child, conceived in the forest.  There seemed to have come to him the daring and the vigor of outdoor things, and the force of nature.  A great man-child was this.

I was not alone in the rejoicing over the infant, though really he was, it seems to me, as dear to me, the isolated man, as to his parents.  They rioted in their vast possession, and were very foolish people.  But why should I keep repeating that these two were very foolish people together?