This subject is not without direct applications. Accoucheurs cause their patients to assume what is called the knee-chest position, a prone one, for the purpose of restoring the uterus to something near a natural position. Brown-Sequard recommends, in myelitis, or spinal congestion, drawing away the blood from the spine by placing the patient on his abdomen or side, with hands and feet somewhat hanging down. The liability to _spina bifida_ is greatest in the human infant, through the stress thrown on the spine. The easy parturition in the lower human races is due to the discrepancy between cranial and pelvic sizes not having been as yet reached by those races. The Sandwich Island mother has a difficult delivery only when her child is half white, and has consequently a longer head than the unmixed native strain.
At present the world goes on in its blindness, apparently satisfied that everything is all right because its exists, ignorant of the evil consequences of apparently beneficial pecularities, vaunting man's erectness and its advantages, while ignoring the disadvantages.
The observation that the lower the animal the more prolific (not universally true!) would warrant the belief that the higher the animal the more difficulties encompass its propagation and development. The cranio-pelvic difficulty may perhaps settle the Malthusian question as far as the higher races of men are concerned by their extinction.
[If the facts brought forward by Dr. Clevenger cannot be controverted, they seem to prove that man must have originated by gradual development from a four-footed being. Had he been created an erect, bipedal animal, as we find him, his structure would have been not in partial, but in perfect, adaptation to the conditions of that attitude. That some of the peculiarities of his structure are better in harmony with a horizontal than a vertical position of the spinal column, is perhaps the strongest argument against the theory of direct creation and the radical _toto coelo_ distinction between man and beast that has yet been advanced. We cannot at the moment lay our hands upon any thorough and trustworthy account of the valves in the veins of the sloth: as that animal spends its life hanging, back downward, the structure of the veins would be interesting in this connection.--ED. J. S.]--_Journal of Science_.