THE SUMMIT OF THE YEARS 



ing our state of reason, some compensation has been 

 made to them; such intelligence as guided the world 

 of animal life down the long aeons before the advent 

 of man, is theirs. Their wisdom is very old; man's 

 is very new. They learned how to live, how to solve 

 their life-problems, ages ago. Man has inherited 

 much, though not all, of their knowledge, and 

 through his new gift of reason he has added vast 

 stores of his own to which they are and must always 

 remain strangers. Through his new faculty he can 

 go to them, and in a measure understand them, but 

 they cannot in the same sense come to him. 



I would not imply that the gulf that separates 

 man from the higher mammals is as great as the gulf 

 that separates him from the world of the inverte- 

 brates, high as is the intelligence that some of these 

 forms display; but it is vastly greater than that 

 which separates the other vertebrate orders from one 

 another. They are all members of one family in the 

 great house of Nature, differing in traits and capa- 

 cities and habits, yet all alike the beneficiaries of 

 natural law. Man in comparison is like a visitant 

 from another sphere; his relation to the animal world 

 is that of a superior being. He takes the globe into 

 his hands and changes its surface, he crosses and uses 

 natural forces, he reverses Nature's processes. If 

 the animals could conceive of a god, man would be 

 that god. His might transcends theirs, not in degree 

 only, but in kind. Their tools are parts of their own 

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