170 LESSONS FROM NATUEE. [CHAP. VI. 



of bodily structure is requisite for the due exercise of tlie 

 mental powers. Thus Mr. Darwin s remarks are merely an 

 elaborate statement of what all admit namely, that man is 

 an animal, coupled with a sort of implied assertion that 

 he is no more, and that the mode of origin of his visible 

 being must be the mode of his origin as a whole a conclusion 

 of which I should not question the legitimacy if I could 

 accept Mr. Darwin s views of man s mental powers. 



But, once more, it is conceded on all hands that man is 

 Necessary an animal, though a rational one. Let us then 

 dmoi^of 011 &quot; assume, for argument s sake, that he was suddenly 

 itty a M and miraculously created. How far do any of the 

 to structure. ^^ s Rg ^ j^ structure or development from the 

 embryonic condition conflict with such a view ? What, from 

 such an origin, ought we to expect ? 



If man, that is, if a rational animal, was to be created at 

 all, he must have been made more or less like some other 

 animal; and for the exercise of rationality in a corporeal 

 frame he must have had a body capable of expressing the 

 unspoken word of thought (the verlum mentale) by con 

 venient external signs of the requisite multitudinous variety. 

 Moreover, since in a rational animal the exercise of the 

 intellect must depend on sensations prodigious in number 

 and most complexly associated, such an animal must pos 

 sess a voluminous nervous system, with the most complex 

 inter-relations between its different parts. 



Man, then, could hardly have been made a member of any 

 of the invertebrate classes. For similar reasons, we may fairly 

 conclude that he could not have been made a member of the 

 cold-blooded division of the vertebrata reptiles and fishes; 

 nor, considering the restricted utility of birds pectoral limbs 

 (their wings), could his intellectual activity have been fittingly 

 housed within the body of any kind of bird. We are reduced, 

 then, to the class mammalia as the only one affording a type 

 of animal structure available to minister to a reflective, self- 

 conscious nature. Amongst mammals, the whole group of 

 marine forms (whales, porpoises, seals) and that of hoofed beasts 



