132 THE RELATIONS OF MAN TO THE LOWER ANIMALS. 



teachings, instead of diminishing our reverence and our 

 wonder, adds all the force of intellectual sublimity, to the 

 mere aesthetic intuition of the uninstructed beholder. 



And after passion and prejudice have died away, the 

 same result will attend the teachings of the naturalist re- 

 specting that great Alps and Andes of the living world — 

 Man. Our reverence for the nobility of manhood will not 

 be lessened by the knowledge, that Man is, in substance 

 and in structure, one with the brutes ; for, he alone pos- 

 sesses the marvellous endowment of intelligible and ra- 

 tional speech, whereby, in the secular period of his exist- 

 ence, he has slowly accumulated and organized the expe- 

 rience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation of 

 every individual life in other animals ; so that now he 

 stands raised upon it as on a mountain top, far above the 

 level of his humble fellows, and transfigured from his 

 grosser nature by reflecting, here and there, a ray from 

 the infinite source of truth. 



