492 THE CAT. [chap. xiii. 



are, in their own various ways, as highly developed as are those of 

 the Felidw. It is certainly very true that it is only through the 

 possession of perfectly-formed bones and muscles, of a delicate seuse 

 of hearing, or of far-reaching vision, that antelopes, hares, and such 

 creatures, escape their carnivorous pursuers. But then they use 

 their organization for escape. The organization of the cat-tribe may 

 then be deemed superior, because it is not only excellent in itself, 

 but because it is fitted to dominate the excellences of other beasts. 

 Thus considered, the Carnivora would rank first amongst mam- 

 mals, and the cats would rank first amongst the Carnivora. Man, 

 however, is a mammal, and therefore to affirm this would be to 

 affirm the inferiority of our own species. But man's superiority is 

 mental, it resides in his intellect, not in his peculiarly-formed great 

 toe, hand, pelvis, or other corporeal peculiarity. Man is to be 

 regarded in two lights — as a truly intellectual being, and as animal 

 with a certain organization. Viewed in the first mode, he stands quite 

 apart from and outside of the whole visible creation, and has simply 

 no place whatever in any scheme of biological classification. Con- 

 sidered merely in his capacity as an animal, he has a very definite 

 place in such a scheme, but it is by no means certain that his place 

 is at its summit. Our powers of locomotion and of sense perception 

 are quite inferior to those of very many beasts, and though our brain 

 is large, both absolutely and relatively, yet such are the variations 

 in this respect, presented by animals of different groups and by 

 diff'erent animals of the same group, that the naturalist would be a 

 bold one who should venture to affirm that a brain-classification of 

 vertebrate animals — to say nothing of the Invertebrata — would be 

 a satisfactory one. The close bodily resemblance of apes to man 

 gives them then no just claim to a rank above that of the Carnivora, 

 since such a claim only reposes on their bodily resemblance to our- 

 selves. As to their intelligence, no evidence seems to be forthcoming 

 that it is superior to that of the dog or of the elephant^ though their 

 close likeness to ourselves gives to their tricks a deceptive appearance 

 of rationality which we must always be careful adequately to discount 

 if we would correctly estimate their real worth. 



The apes are, like the dogs and the elephant, superior perhaps 

 in cognitive psychical endowments to the cat, but yet any such dif- 

 ferences between these animals are merely difierences of degree and 

 not of kind, like that which we have seen to exist between the cat- 

 mind and our own. 



It may, perhaps, be objected to these observations, that biological 

 classification is (as has been pointed out in this work) a morpho- 

 logical and not a physiological classification ; that it reposes not on 

 function but on structure. This is most true, and nothing could 

 well be more preposterous than a proposal to classify all creatures 

 according to their psychical endowments. Such a classification would 

 tear away ants and bees from insects obviously like them, and associate 

 them with beavers, and it would utterly confuse all biological science. 

 But though it is true that animals must be classified according to 



