SOME ANALOGIES AND HOMOLOGIES. 97 



and hard-working gardener striving to ontwit the enemies and 

 parasites of his time, saving and enwreathing his cares in the 

 glory of the achievements of the past. 



The animal moves most gifted and superior animal that 

 possesses a power which the plant does not ! Is this a truism ? 

 Among many kinds of fungi, water-weeds, sea-weeds, mosses, and 

 even ferns, the spores and male organs actually possess locomotive 

 power, and by means of cilia and flagella are able to move from 

 the parent plant, and distribute themselves to some distance. 



The suicidal mania is apparently appreciated by not man only. 

 In Africa, ants have been seen marching by thousands for days 

 together into a stream, and being swallowed by crowds of fish as 

 fast as they could get into the water. Butterflies have been known 

 to migrate in numbers to the sea. Similar tales have been told of 

 rats. 



We say that the existence and possession of a soul, the some- 

 thing that dogmatic theology asserts can exist after the death of 

 the brain, after the death of the individual, is the attribute of 

 man alone, and marks him as the head of the creation. Every 

 thought that passes through our mind, every effort that guides 

 our pen, is brought about by the molecular energy of the brain 

 and of the muscle cells; this power is dependent upon the proper 

 nutrition of these cells and of the body as a whole. Starve the 

 tissues of the brain and muscle thought no longer flows, the pen 

 is no longer guided. The lower animals think, move, have 

 instinct ; they are conscious of ill or wrong, of joy and remorse, 

 and herein lie the totalities of the soul. Soul is only the name for 

 a mystery that we can not explain, and this mysterious combina- 

 tion which leads us to dwell upon a life devoid of mechanism, a 

 life freed from the trammels of matter, with its repellent forces 

 and energies, surely belongs to us only in degree. What rights 

 have we, what proofs have we, to help us to assume to ourselves a 

 one exclusive evolving soul, fitting itself for a newer and purer 

 existence, and yet to deny all that we base our hopes upon to the 

 whole of the rest of the creation ? Surely the lower animals have 

 their degree of soul, and a chance of a lesser heaven as well as 

 our important selves. Our thoughts and actions are bestial, only 

 too often to a loathsoire degree; and on the other hand not only 

 the ape world, but also still lower creatures, point us daily many 

 a useful moral or loving lesson. Does the existence of the soul 

 mark the gulf that separates man from all other living beings ? 

 Does the lowest Bushman of to-day possess a soul denied to the 

 highest anthropoid ape, and if he does not, who shall draw the 

 line where the animal is separated from beatified man ? not man, 

 at all events. 



In the frightful and only too common form of insanity, "the 



VOL. XLTI. 8 



