MAN IN NATURE 215 



) This is markedly seen in the gift of speech. Man, 

 *like other animals, has certain natural utterances ex 

 pressive of emotions or feelings. He can also, like 

 some of them, imitate the sounds produced by ani 

 mate or inanimate objects, and he has better mechani 

 cal powers of articulation than other animals. But 

 when he develops these gifts into a system of speech, 

 expressing not mere sounds occurring in nature, but, 

 by association and analogy with these, properties and 

 relations of objects, and general and abstract ideas, he 

 rises into the higher sphere of the spiritual. He thus 

 elevates a power of utterance common to him with 

 animals to a higher plane, and, connecting it with his 

 capacity for understanding nature and arriving at 

 general truths, asserts his kinship to the great creative 

 mind, and furnishes a link of connection between the 

 material universe and the spiritual Creator^ 



The mode of existence of man in nature is as 

 well illustrated by his arts and inventions as by any 

 thing else ; and these serve also to enlighten us as to 

 the distinction between the natural and the artificial. 

 Naturalists often represent man as dependent on 

 nature for the first hints of his useful arts. There 

 are in animal nature tailors, weavers, masons, potters, 

 carpenters, miners, and sailors, independently of man, 

 and many of the tools, implements, and machines which 

 he is said to have invented were perfected in the struc 

 tures of lower animals long before he came into exist 

 ence. In all these things man has been an assiduous 



