ON THE STUDY OF BIOLOGY. 533 



of the position of man in this universe, and his relation to the rest of 

 Nature. We have almost all of us been told, and most of us hold 

 by the tradition, that man occupies an isolated and peculiar position 

 in Nature ; that though he is in the world he is not of the world ; 

 that his relations to things about him are of a remote character, that 

 his origin is recent, his duration likely to be short, and that he is the 

 great central figure round which other things in this world revolve. 

 But this is not what the biologists tell us. At the present moment 

 you will be kind enough to separate me from them, because it is in 

 no way essential to my argument just now that I should advocate 

 their views. Don't suppose that I am saying this for the purpose of 

 escaping the responsibility of their beliefs, because at other times and 

 in other places I do not think that point has been left doubtful ; but I 

 want clearly to point out to you that for my present argument they 

 may all be wrong ; nevertheless, my argument will hold good. The 

 biologists tell us that all this is an entire mistake. They turn to the 

 physical organization of man. They examine his whole structure, his 

 bony frame, and all that clothes it. They resolve him into the finest 

 particles into which the microscope will enable them to break him up. 

 They consider the performance of his various functions and activities, 

 and they look at the manner in which he occurs on the surface of the 

 world. Then they turn to other animals, and, taking the first handy 

 domestic animal say a dog they profess to be able to demonstrate 

 that the analysis of the dog leads them in gross to precisely the same 

 results as the analysis of the man; that they find almost identically 

 the same bones, having the same relations ; that they can name the 

 muscles of the dog by the names of the muscles of the man, and the 

 nerves of the dog by those of the nerves of the man, and that such 

 structures and organs of sense as we find in the man such also we find 

 in the dog ; they analyze the brain and spinal cord, and find the no- 

 menclature which does for the one answer for the other. They carry 

 their microscopic inquiries in the case of the dog as far as they can, 

 and they find that his body is resolvable into the same elements as 

 those of the man. Moreover, they trace back the dog's and the man's 

 development, and they find that at a certain stage of their existence 

 the two creatures are not distinguishable the one from the other ; they 

 find that the dog and his kind have a certain distribution over the 

 surface of the world comparable in its way to the distribution of the 

 human species. What is true of the dog they tell us is true of all 

 the higher animals; and they find that for the whole of these creat- 

 ui'es they can lay down a common plan, and regard the man and the 

 dog, the horse and the ox, as minor modifications of one great funda- 

 mental unity. Moreover, the investigations of the last three-quarters 

 of a century have proved, they tell us, that similar inquiries carried 

 out through all the different kinds of animals which are met with in 

 Nature will lead us, not in one straight series, but by many roads, 



