Il6 THE EVOLUTION OF LIVING BEINGS. 



consciously dwells upon it, that all was made for his 

 pleasure. This anthropocentric standpoint causes him 

 to believe that the world could not possibly have been 

 so good before he was pleased to make his appearance 

 into it, than after this never-sufficiently-to-be-appre- 

 ciated condescension of his, and so we have had, in all 

 seriousness, a discussion on the supposed inadequacy 

 of the adaptation of the plants of coal measure times. 



It is this same anthropocentric pedantry which 

 leads man to consider himself the crown of the universe, 

 and to arrange the different kinds of animals accor- 

 ding to their degree of lesser or greater similarity 

 to himself, claiming that those most differing from 

 his Nibbs, are the lower ones, those resembling him 

 most, the higher ones, thus creating the conception of 

 progression. 



So a little chit of a monkey becomes „higher" than 

 an elephant, a mouse higher than a Condor, (is not 

 sucking the young, like a human mother, much „higher" 

 than feeding them on carrion) a slow-worm higher 

 than a shark, poor little Amphioxus higher than a 

 giant cuttle-fish, a clam higher than the most beauti- 

 ful of yelly-fishes and all such nonsense. 



Very rightly Victor Franz has maintained in the 

 Biologisches Centralblatt 191 1 p. i,/that we possess no 

 reliable measure whatever for the determination of 

 which organisms are higher, which lower on the scale. 



The result depends entirely on which characters we 

 choose for comparison. If we choose the brain and the 

 urogenital system as our measure, one can indeed ar- 

 gue that man is the highest animal, but if we choose 



