BIOLOGICAL BEGINNINGS 29 



Thus we can understand how it has come to pass that man and all other 

 vertebrate animals have been constructed on the same general model, why 

 they pass through the same early stages of development, and why they 

 retain certain rudiments in -common. Consequently we ought frankly to 

 admit their community of descent; to take any other view, is to admit that 

 our own structure, and that of all the animals around us, is a mere snare 

 laid to entrap our judgment. This conclusion is greatly strengthened, if 

 we look to the members of the whole animal series, and consider the evi- 

 dence derived from their affinities or classification, their geographical 

 distribution and geological succession. It is only our natural prejudice, and 

 that arrogance which made our forefathers declare that they were de- 

 scended from demi-gods, which leads us to demur to the conclusion. But 

 the time will before long come, when it will be thought wonderful that 

 naturalists, who were well acquainted with the comparative structure 

 and development of man, and other mammals, should have believed that 

 each was the work of a separate act of creation. 



ON THE RELATIONS OF MAN TO THE 

 LOWER ANLMALS * 



THOMAS H. HUXLEY 



The question of questions for mankind — the problem which underlies 

 all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other — is the ascer- 

 tainment of the place which Man occupies in nature and of his relations to 

 the universe of things. Whence our race has come; what are the limits 

 of our power over nature, and of nature's power over us; to what goal we 

 are tending; are the problems which present themselves anew and with 

 undiminished interest to every man born into the world. Most of us 

 shrinking from the difficulties and dangers which beset the seeker after 

 original answers to these riddles, are contented to ignore them altogether, 

 or to smother the investigating spirit under the featherbed of respected 

 and respectable tradition. But, in every age, one or two restless spirits, 

 blessed with that constructive genius, which can only build on a secure 

 foundation, or cursed with the mere spirit of scepticism, are unable to 

 follow in the well-worn and comfortable trace of their forefathers and 

 contemporaries, and unmindful of thorns and stumbling-blocks, strike 

 out into paths of their own. The sceptics end in the infidelity which asserts 

 the problem to be insoluble, or in the atheism which denies the existence 

 of any orderly progress and governance of things: the men of genius pro- 



• From Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature by Thomas H. Huxley. D. Appleton 

 Co., New York. 1871, 



