1875.] and the Lower Animals. 63 
Celts, Teuton, and Slav are as remote from each other 
respectively as any of them are from the swarthy Aryan of 
India, and that the latter approaches no nearer to the negro 
than do our worshipful and self-worshipping selves. We 
are prone to contrast Englishmen with foreigners. We do 
not, indeed, conceive that the latter class is perfectly homo- 
geneous: we admit that there is some little difference be- 
tween a Frenchman or a German on the one hand and an 
Ashantee or a Papuan on the other; still we hold that all 
foreigners differ so widely and fundamentally from English- 
men that such nice shades of variation may well be over- 
looked. 
Here also belongs that tendency to ‘‘ successive halving ” 
upon which the English opponents of the metric system of 
weightsand measures—suchas Sir ]. Herschel—depend as one 
of theirchief arguments. They tell us that it is ‘‘an instin& 
of human nature” to divide everything into two portions— 
that the hundredweight is thus halved and halved again 
down to the 33 lb., and that the authorities have even been 
memorialised to sanction the use of a 13lb. weight. All 
this is afurther illustration of man’s natural proneness to 
dichotomy. 
There is a singular feature in certain cases of binary 
arrangement, which may be most readily understood by a 
reference to the views prevailing in chemical science during 
the first quarter of the present century. Oxygen was, tacitly 
at least, singled out and placed in one class by itself, the 
remaining elementary bodies forming the second. It was 
the great element, as much superior to the rest as ‘‘man” 
is to “beast,” as “‘ Englishman” is to ‘ foreigner ”—we 
might almost say as “respectable Englishman” is to 
“pauper.” Every newly-discovered substance was primarily, 
if not exclusively, studied with reference to oxygen. Where- 
soever it entered it was supposed to play the active part, 
other substances present in the reaction being merely passive. 
Thus it was the ‘‘ supporter ’’—the cause—of combustion, 
whilst the substances with which it united—compounds of 
carbon, hydrogen, and the like—were merely combustibles, 
bodies capable of suffering or undergoing the process. 
This is a typical and an instructive case. In his binary 
arrangements man is very apt to take the one class in his 
right hand, if the phrase may be allowed, and to view it 
with especial interest and favour. Nay, sometimes this ex- 
ceptional favour is the only base upon which such classifi- 
cations rest. 
We do not mean to lay down the law that every binary 
