30 MAN THE ANIMAL 



lectures occasion will be taken to follow further the implications 

 of this point. 



IV 



So far the discussion has been of those characteristics that set 

 man apart as unique among the mammals. The treatment of 

 the case has been positive and affirmative in character. Now 

 it will be well to emphasize the conclusions reached by looking 

 briefly at the negative side — that is by showing in outline that a 

 great many of man's characteristics and behavior are essentially 

 identical with the characteristics and behavior of the other 

 mammals — the lower classes of animals from which he stemmed. 

 It will then be completely clear that while man is the unique 

 mammal, he is so in only a comparatively few respects, but 

 those extremely important ones. 



In the first place the general plan and pattern of man's 

 anatomical structure is mammalian. The correspondence is un- 

 cannily close and manifold, as every budding biologist learns 

 the first time he dissects a cat and compares his findings with the 

 pictures in Gray's Human Anatomy. As J. S. Prichard, one of 

 the founders of modern anthropology, said in his Natural 

 History oj Man ( 1 843) more than a quarter of a century before 

 Charles Darwin's Descent of Man appeared: "In all the prin- 

 ciples of his internal structure, in the composition and function of 

 its parts, man is but an animal. . . . The points of resemblance 

 are innumerable j they extend to the most recondite arrange- 

 ments of that mechanism which maintains instrumentally the 

 physical life of the body, which brings forward its early de- 

 velopment and admits, after a given period, its decay, and by 

 means of which is prepared a succession of similar beings des- 

 tined to perpetuate the race." 



What is true of man's anatomy in this respect is also true of 

 his physiology. His heart, his lungs, his kidneys, and his 

 endocrine organs function in the same way as the corresponding 

 organs in his mammalian relatives. In a broad view and that is 

 the only one that limitations of time allow to be taken here, the 



