EVOLUTION OF THE HUMAN FORM. 509 



organs of locomotion from four to two and the development of a hand 

 with grasping powers. But in this physical deviation lies the secret 

 of the whole mental deviation. The species of animals below man 

 are obliged to depend upon their personal organs^, being incapable of 

 availing themselves of natural objects. The elephant, with its grasping 

 trunk, and the apes, with their partly freed hands, are nearly the sole 

 exceptions to this rule. Man, on the contrary, by the freeing of his 

 fore limbs from duty in locomotion and the grasping power of his 

 hands, became able to add to his own powers those of nature, to employ 

 weapons and tools fashioned from non-living matter, and thus to 

 initiate a new cycle of evolution that was scarcely touched upon in the 

 world below him. 



The employment of tools and weapons separate from those pro- 

 vided by nature in the body is a condition demanding the active exer- 

 cise of the mental powers, and at once gave man an incitement to the 

 development of the mind which did not exist in the lower animals. 

 We need not pursue this subject farther. The new process of evolu- 

 tion thus begun, — that of the exercise of the faculty of thought in 

 making use of the powers of nature — it went on until it yielded man 

 as he now exists, a being in whom the intellect controls not only his 

 own bodily actions but largely all nature below him. 



If now, we may justly conjecture that animals resembling our 

 quadrupeds in general organization appeared on other planets, and if a 

 thinking being analogous to man also appeared on any of these planets, 

 it is very difficult to conceive how he could have arisen in any widely 

 different way. It certainly seems as if the evolution of the higher 

 intelligence in any planet must have depended upon some means of 

 making use of the forces of nature, and the first step towards this, 

 starting from the quadruped, would seem necessarily to be in the direc- 

 tion of the biped, with free arms and grasping hands. 



There is thus considerable reason to believe that the beings which 

 answer to man upon any of the planets of the universe must at least 

 approach man somewhat closely in physical configuration. They may 

 differ in minor details of organization, in many cases they may have 

 escaped the special organic weaknesses of man, but it certainly seems as 

 if a human traveler, if he could make a tour of the universe, would 

 find beings whom he could hail as kindred upon a thousand spheres. 



