The Gorilla's Foot

Abstract

IT is a truism that misunderstandings and disagreements often develop through identical terms being used by the disputants in different senses and through the raising of new questions not originally recognised as involved in the point at issue. When Sir Ray Lankester first applied the words “distorted” and “misleading” to the photograph of the cast of the dead gorilla's foot, originally published by Mr. Akeley in World's Work, I perhaps mistakenly inferred from the context that Sir Ray Lankester had reference chiefly to the position of the great toe, which in the photograph was shown as directed forward rather than in the position of abduction made familiar in numerous earlier pictures of the gorilla foot. With the original cast and a print from the original negative before me, I was confident that the photograph gave “a very fair representation” of the cast, with special reference to the contour of the foot as a whole, to the position of the great toe, to the partial twisting of its plantar surface toward the other toes, to the relative positions of all the toes, to the form of the heel and other points. As it was a casual photograph of a dead-white plaster cast, I did not expect it to show the finer details of the surface, especially in a small half-tone reproduction.