294 BIRD LIFE GLIMPSES 



race has produced no man higher than Toussaint 

 rOuverture, who to the giants of the Aryan stock 

 is as Ben Nevis to Mount Everest : and so on, and 

 so on — a multitude of difficulties, as it appears to 

 me, which the theory has neither answered, nor, as 

 far as I know, has yet been called upon to answer. 



I really do wish that writers upon psychical 

 subjects would sometimes make an allusion to the 

 animal world — the very existence of which one 

 might, almost, suppose they had forgotten. The 

 perpetual ignoring of so vast a matter — as though 

 one were to go about, affecting not to breathe — is 

 not only irritating, but calculated to produce a bad 

 impression. Surely the originator or maintainer of 

 any view or doctrine of the nature and immortal 

 destinies of man, ought to be delighted to enforce 

 his arguments by showing that they are applicable, 

 not to man only, but to millions of animals, to 

 whom, as we all now very well know, he is more or 

 less closely related. When, therefore, we constantly 

 miss this most natural and necessary extension, it is 

 difficult not to think that some flaw, some weak 

 point in the hypothesis — and, if so, what a weak 

 one ! — is being carefully avoided. It is amusing to 

 contrast the space which animals occupy in such a 

 work as Darwin's " Descent of Man " with that 

 allotted to them — to be counted not by pages, but 

 lines — in those two huge volumes of the late Mr. 

 Myers' " Human Personality and its Survival of 

 Physical Death." Yet, as clearly as man's body, in 

 the former work, is shown to have been evolved out 

 of the bodies of animals, so clearly is his mind 

 demonstrated to have come to him through their 



