MAN IN NATURE. 445 



MAN IN NATURE. 



By M. PAUL TOPINARD. 



MAN is an animal, by the same title with other animals, 

 without any more rights than those conferred upon him 

 by virtue of the law of the strongest, by his physical organiza- 

 tion, his physiological attributes, and his success in the struggle 

 for existence. His body is of the same substance, is composed of 

 the same tissues, and possesses the same organs. His forms are 

 simple variants, produced by the same force that urges other 

 beings to differentiation. Like every animal, he participates in 

 the everlasting round of being born, reproducing, and dying. 

 He was such when Galen dissected the ape to study it, and he has 

 continued the same, resembling the ape in some respects and 

 differing from it in others, subject to the same wants, the same 

 physical experiences, the same instinctive impulses, the same 

 inner feeling urging him to take everything to himself. In con- 

 sideration of the highly developed properties of his cerebral 

 organ, of his judgment, which permits him to see things exactly 

 as they are, of his memory, which enables him to store up ob- 

 servations and draw inductions of the whole from them, of his 

 routine-breaking initiative, and of his ideal conceptions, he may 

 by a turn of mind regard himself as forming a separate kingdom 

 in the Cosmos. But, in his body he is and always will be an 

 animal — a vertebrate, a mammal, a monodelph, a Primate. None 

 of the characteristics of these groups is wanting in him ; eminent- 

 ly none of those of the Primates. He possesses peculiar character- 

 istics which give him a special place of favor among them ; but 

 he begins by having their general characters. 



" Then," you will tell us, " you place man by the side of the 

 monkeys, of those beings which are often so abject. Could you 

 not find a nobler animal ?" That is prejudice, judgment by ap- 

 pearances. The monkeys are not disinherited beings, but the 

 contrary. Some of the ungulates — the deers and the horses — 

 have reached a high grade in the scale of the mammals: we 

 esteem them because of the perfect adaptation of all their parts 

 to an ideal of existence ; their forms are elegant, their paces are 

 graceful and rapid ; they render us service while contributing to 

 our pleasures ; they are the last efflorescence of a branch which 

 has been growing and blooming since the Eocene epoch. Some of 

 the carnivores, like the cats, are likewise objects of our admiration 

 for the complete harmony of their whole organisms to their pecul- 

 iar modes of life ; they have power, nobility, and freedom. But 

 neither of these possess what the humble monkeys have — a cere- 

 bral type, predicted among them all from its origin, and already 



