THE MIND'S MIRROR. 269 



faint echo from a far distant past, testifying to a kinship which man 

 has almost outgrown, or has grown too proud to acknowledge? 

 No doubt such animal traits are marks of extreme human degeneracy, 

 but it is no explanation to call them so ; degenerations come by law, 

 and are as natural as law can make them. . . . Why should a human 

 being deprived of his reason ever become so brutal in character as 

 some do, unless he has the brute nature within him ? " " We may," 

 concludes this eminent authority, "without much difficulty trace 

 savagery in civilisation, as we can trace animalism in savagery ; and 

 in the degeneration of insanity, in the unkinding, so to say, of the 

 human kind, there are exhibited marks denoting the elementary 

 instincts of its composition." 



These are weighty words ; but the grounds on which they are 

 uttered amply justify their conclusions. Turn in which direction 

 we will, we meet with evidences of man's lowly origin now in a 

 plain proof of his kinship with lower forms, now in a mere suggestion 

 presented in some bypath of nature, showing us a possible connec- 

 tion with humbler grades and even in the passing flash of emotion 

 which, sweeping across the mirror of the mind, reveals the workings 

 of the soul within, we may find, as in a random thought, a clue to 

 the origin of our race. 



