152 MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS. n 



the brutes, however closely they may seem to ap- 

 proximate us." 



To this I can only reply that the exclamation 

 would be most just and would have my own entire 

 sympathy, if it were only relevant. But, it is not 

 I who seek to base Man's dignity upon his great 

 toe, or insinuate that we are lost if an Ape has a 

 hippocampus minor. On the contrary, I have done 

 my best to sweep away this vanity. I have en- 

 deavoured to show that no absolute structural line 

 of demarcation, wider than that between the ani- 

 mals which immediately succeed us in the scale, 

 can be drawn between the animal world and our- 

 selves; and I may add the expression of my belief 

 that the attempt to draw a psychical distinction 

 is equally futile, and that even the highest facul- 

 ties of feeling and of intellect begin to germinate 

 in lower forms of life.* At the same time, no one 

 is more strongly convinced than I am of the vast- 

 ness of the gulf between civilised man and the 

 brutes; or is more certain that whether from them 

 or not, he is assuredly not of them. No one is 

 less disposed to think likely of the present 

 dignity, or despairingly of the future hopes, 



* It is so rare a pleasure for me to find Professor 

 Owen's opinions in entire accordance with my own, that I 

 cannot forbear from quoting a paragraph which appeared 

 in his Essay "On the Characters. &c, of the Class Mam- 

 malia," in the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean 

 Society of London for 1857, but is unaccountably omitted 

 in the " Eeade Lecture " delivered before the University 

 of Cambridge two years later, which is otherwise nearly 

 a reprint of the paper in question. Prof. Owen writes: 



