THE RELIGION OF NATURE 



mals, and admits the savage into the select com- 

 pany of beings with the likeness of God in their 

 consciences. 



But you must remember that a similar difficulty 

 arises in classifying all orders of animals. 



When, for instance, we have been studying the 

 wonderful ways of ants, bees, and wasps, whose 

 actions seem to rival the highest efforts of human 

 intelligence, and to be instinct with virtuous affec- 

 tion, it is a shock to come to the class next above 

 them and find such things as sea-mats there; or, 

 passing over these and the still higher classes, 

 containing slugs and snails, oysters and cuttlefish, 

 to come to the sea-squirts things like mere bottles 

 with two necks. But we cannot deny that in its 

 earlier stages the sea-squirt resembles a tadpole 

 with a central rod inside its body, which we must 

 recognize (from analogy with the tadpole itself, 

 which becomes a vertebrate frog, and the queer 

 little lancelet, which leads us to the kingdom of 

 fishes) as probably the first sign visible to us in 

 nature of the evolution of the backbone, which 

 in its highest development, encloses the brain and 

 vital column of man himself. 



If we were as interested by personal sentiment 

 in the ants and the bees as we are in our dogs and 

 horses, we should more strongly resent the com- 

 pulsion thus put upon us by science to place our 

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