II 



OBJECTIONS. 153 



of the only consciously intelligent denizen of this 

 world. 



We are indeed told by those who assume author- 

 ity in these matters, that the two sets of opinions 

 are incompatible, and that the belief in the unity 

 of origin of man and brutes involves the brutaliza- 

 tion and degradation of the former. But is this 

 really so? Could not a sensible child confute by 

 obvious arguments, the shallow rhetoricians who 

 would force this conclusion upon us? Is it, in- 

 deed, true, that the Poet, or the Philosopher, or 

 the Artist whose genius is the glory of his age, 

 is degraded from his high estate by the undoubted 

 historical probability, not to say certainty, that he 

 is the direct descendant of some naked and bestial 

 savage, whose intelligence was just sufficient to 

 make him a little more cunning than the Fox, and 

 by so much more dangerous than the Tiger? Or is 

 he bound to howl and grovel on all fours because of 



" Not being able to appreciate or conceive of the dis- 

 tinction between the psychical phenomena of a Chimpan- 

 zee and of a Boschisman or of an Aztec, with arrested 

 brain growth, as being of a nature so essential as to pre- 

 clude a comparison between them, or as being other than 

 a difference of degree, I cannot shut my eyes to the sig- 

 nificance of that all-pervading similitude of structure — ■ 

 every tooth, every bone, strictly homologous — which 

 makes the determination of the difference between Homo 

 and Pithecus the anatomist's difficulty." 



Surely it is a little singular, that the " anatomist," 

 who finds it " difficult " to determine " the difference " be- 

 tween Homo and Pithecus, should yet range them on 

 anatomical grounds, in distinct sub-classes. 



