6 STUDIES IN" LIFE AND SENSE. 



forms just noted, or by the countless modifications into which one 

 and the same plan, has, undoubtedly, through the ages of the past, 

 been evolved. 



This digression into the regions of lower life has fitted us for a 

 profitable return to the domain which claims humanity as the flower 

 of its flock. Man's frame, the most complex which the anatomist 

 knows, is commonly believed to be constructed on a type peculiar to 

 itself. It is, at least, a matter of common belief that we stand on 

 a structural platform that is peculiarly our own. It is this tacit 

 belief which causes us to regard any obvious approach to our own 

 structure and conformation as in the apes, for example in the 

 light of a natural burlesque, rather than as a sober reality, depending 

 upon causes and laws written unmistakably in the constitution of 

 living things. Yet there is no truth further removed from the region 

 of fiction or hypothesis, than that which asserts that man has no type 

 peculiar to himself, any more than a shrimp or butterfly possesses a 

 bodily plan essentially and peculiarly its own. On the contrary, we 

 see in the human frame, merely the most specialised and distinct 

 form of a particular type or plan, which agrees in its broad details, as 

 a plan, with that seen in every fish, frog, reptile, bird, and quad- 

 ruped or mammal. Humanity rears its head erect at the top of 

 the animal tree, but it exists after all only at the end of its own 

 particular branch, which we know scientifically as the Vertebrata, 

 or, familiarly, as the " backboned " type. Every feature which, in 

 man, is to be regarded as most purely distinctive and human in its 

 nature, can be shown to represent simply the extreme development 

 or modification of characters or organs belonging to the type as a 

 whole. From man's liver to his brain, from the bones of his wrist to 

 the structure of his eye, there is nothing to be found that is not fore- 

 shadowed in type in the quadruped class, or even in lower verte- 

 brates still. Later on we shall have occasion to show that, as Mr. 

 Darwin remarks, man bears in his body undeniable traces of his 

 lowly origin. So that those philosophers who may feel inclined to 

 grumble at the clear evidences which anatomy presents of man's 

 relationship to, and place in, a great common type of animal life, 

 will require, after all, to bear a grudge not against the anatomist, but 

 against Nature herself, and against the constitution of the animal 

 world. It is hardly worth our while in truth to feel aggrieved, for 

 example, at the knowledge that the highest apes possess a hand 

 which, bone for bone and muscle for muscle, resembles our own in type, 

 when we discover that man's " third eyelid " existing in a rudi- 

 mentary state is in reality a relic of a complete structure, possessed 

 by animals as low down in the vertebrate scale as the fishes. If we 

 are to be unphilosophical enough to consider questions of dignity, 

 when some obvious resemblance between ourselves and our nearest 



