The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1892-02-07
A QUESTION OF LEGS.

There Is promise of a vague and shadowy
but interesting person who is called the
coming man" What at present we should
like to know ABOUT him is whether he will
have legs. This may seem grotesque and
absurd, but it is not. On the contrary, it
is reasonable and pertinent 1t may be
asked, how could the coming man get along
without legs! But that is none of our par
ticular business; that is the coming mans
lookout
There was time in the history of the
human race. as evolutionists tell US. when
men had tails, and if an inquisitive person
of that day had asked if the coming
man would have tail he would have been
laughed out of respectable society. But
man has lived long enough to find he can
get along without a tail-and what is there
TO prevent him living long enough 10 dis
cover that he can get along without legs!
The tail disappeared when the hint was
given that there was no longer any use for
it, and it is reasonable to suppose that the
legs will be equally oOliging and vanish
when there shall be no longer use for them.
The drift of things is setting strongly in
that direction. Railways, street roads and
elevators, not to speak of ballooning
baskets, are bringing legs into 'innocuous
desuetude." Travelling once meant walk
ing, but it means that no longer. a man
may sit still or sleep and yet travel at the
rate of fifty miles an hour Getting up
stairs used to mean climbing up, step by
step, from the ground floor to the upper
stories, but this laborious process is going
fast out Of fashion, and the new practice is
to step into cage and shoot aloft in a
litter. The use for legs, therefore, is
growing less every year, and it does
not require a very daring flight of the
Imagination to picture condition OF civil
ization in which human beings will cease to
run and walk, and will be transported in
Simultaneously from place to place by the
agency offpocket motors, in dynamo devices,
worked with spring or button, and sc
graduated as to impart any rate OF
velocity required.
1t may take centuries, perhaps ages, tc
arrive at this strife of perfection, but we
are on the road already, and in one or two
generations from this time it will probably
be found that human legs are beginning Il
shrivel. Comparative anatomists assure
US that in an age long past men worked
their ears back and forth like horse OF
that other animal, the horses halt brother
and, truly, IN dissecting the human head
they point out the shrunken remnan tt
of once powerful ear muscles il
proof of the theory Human teeth
are disappearing under the soft food re
gime which gives them so little exercise
The primeval man not only tore the fest
from the bones of his prey with his teeth
but crushed the bones thereon. Tht
crumbling molars, incisors and bicuspids o!
the civilized man of the present period
would recoil from the task of cracking
hickory nut or biting hard apple, and it i:
not altogether improbable that the grand
children of the grandchildren of to-day
will have nothing but rudimentary in
csors attached to their gums to REMIND
them that their ancestors were accustomed
to biting and chewing.
The coming man, then, may be both leg
less and toothless. Two rows of gums, Sc
off with callousities, will have taken tn,
place of teeth, and shrivelled rudimentar,
, sJumps dangling from the lower part of tn
body will be the only vistiges of an ag
when legs were part of the human outfit
r and running and walking were hardship
, in the life of his ancestors.