80 MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS n 



character that a new ecdysis seems imminent. 

 But this is a process not unusually accompanied 

 by many throes and some sickness and debility, 

 or, it may be, by graver disturbances; so that 

 every good citizen must feel bound to facilitate 

 the process, and even if he have nothing but a 

 scalpel to work withal, to ease the cracking in- 

 tegument to the best of his ability. 



In this duty lies my excuse for the publication 

 of these essays. For it will be admitted that some 

 knowledge of man's position in the animate world 

 is an indispensable preliminary to the proper 

 understanding of his relations to the universe; 

 and this again resolves itself, in the long run, 

 into an inquiry into the nature and the closeness 

 of the ties which connect him with those singular 

 creatures whose history 1 has been sketched in the 

 preceding pages. 



The importance of such an inquiry is indeed 

 intuitively manifest. Brought face to face with 

 these blurred copies of himself, the least thought- 

 ful of men is conscious of a certain shock, due 

 perhaps, not so much to disgust at the aspect of 

 what looks like an insulting caricature, as to the 

 awakening of a sudden and profound mistrust of 

 time-honoured theories and strongly-rooted pre- 

 judices regarding his own position in nature, and 



1 It will be understood that, in the preceding Essay, I havo 

 selected for notice from the vast mass of papers which havo 

 been written upon the man-like Apes, only those which seem to 

 mo to be of special moment. 



