X WONDKRFUL ANIMAL. 87 



absolute zoological specialty which serves to tlistingiiish man from 

 the rest of the animal world. He is lord of creation by virtue of 

 his intellectual supremacy alone ; and though it is impossible to 

 deny that the intellectual quality is shared in some degree by the 

 brutes — for in many of them we see evidence, not only of cere- 

 bration, but of ideation, of classification and judgment, with a veiy 

 ob's-ious and definite concept of the effo — yet this supremacy is so 

 great as to leave it little matter for wonder that in time past man 

 should have semi-deified his mind as the immortal part of him, and 

 regarded it as synonymous with the soul. Later knowledge has 

 shown this to be untenable, since the mind may be destroyed at 

 will by a simple surgical operation, and is in fact not seldom so 

 destroyed by accident, while it is subject to decay and death from 

 disease quite independently of the body. Mind is merely the 

 function of a tissue, the secretion of the brain-substance ; but the 

 utter disproportion between the increase of this tissue and its 

 developed action is perhaps the most marvellous and least ex- 

 pKcable of all human phenomena. Our brain is only about three 

 times as large as that of a gorilla or chimpanzee, and very little 

 more elaborate in its elemental complexity ; yet no one would 

 di'eam of stating its resultant function, the mind, as equivalent 

 to thrice or thi'ee huncbed times that of the ape. And then look 

 at the enormous progression that goes on, centiuy after century. 

 Everywhere outside man we find psychical fixity ; but if the 

 increment of mind during no more than the last fifty years could 

 receive material expression in anatomical factors, bone, muscle, and 

 artery, it would yield basis enough to found a new species. For 

 this stupendous evolution, practically unaccompanied by corre- 

 sponding structural development, there is, so far as I know, only 

 one parallel throughout nature; but there is a parallel, in the 

 venom-gland of a poisonous seii^cnt. This gland is to all appear- 

 ance simply a common parotid, the exact analogue of those which 

 swell up so uncomfortably and ridiculously when we have mumps. 

 All snakes have them ; but how or why the secretion, an ordinary 

 saliva, should acquire so remarkable a property in the lethal species 

 is a mystery as little to be solved as the origin of the human mind. 

 Xot only in our anatomy and physiology, but, as it seems to 

 mc, in our acts and deeds, if we analyse them, do we present 

 as much theme for wonder as any creature outside the genus 

 Homo. May I give an illustration of what I mean ? We are 

 lost in admiration, and with good reason too, at the exquisite 

 instinctive nicety and calculation of distance displayed by the 

 squirrel or gibbon in leaping from one slender bough to another, 



