130 THE RELATIONS OF MAN 



more strongly convinced than I am of the vastness of the 

 gulf between civilized man and the brutes ; or is more 

 certain that whether from them or not, he is assuredly 

 not tf/'them. No one is less disposed to think lightly of 

 the present dignity, or despairingly of the future hopes, of 

 the only consciously intelligent denizen of this world. 



We are indeed told by those who assume authority in 

 these matters, that the two sets of opinions are incompati- 

 ble, and that the belief in the unity of origin of man and 

 brutes involves the brutalization 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, indeed, 

 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 suffi- 

 cient 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 the 

 wholly unquestionable fact, that he was once an egg, which 



1857, but is unaccountably omitted in the " Reade Lecture " delivered before 

 the University of Cambridge two years later, which is otherwise nearly a re- 

 print of the paper in question. Prof. Owen writes : 



" Not being able to appreciate or conceive of the distinction between the 

 psychical phenomena of a Chimpanzee and of a Boschisman or of an Aztec, 

 with arrested brain growth, as being of a nature so essential as to preclude a 

 comparison between them, or as being other than a difference of degree, I 

 cannot shut my eyes to the significance 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 ' between Homo and Pithecus, should yet range 

 them on anatomical grounds, in distinct sub-classes ! 



