152 MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS n 



and women, not a mere better sort of apes, a little 

 longer in the leg, more compact in the foot, and 

 bigger in brain than your brutal Chimpanzees and 

 Gorillas. The* power of knowledge the con- 

 science of good and evil the pitiful tenderness of 

 human affections, raise us out of all real fellowship 

 with the brutes, however closely they may seem to 

 approximate us/' 



To this I can only reply that the exclamation 

 would be most just and would have my own entire 

 sympathy, if it were only relevant. But, it is not 

 I who seek to base Man's dignity upon his great 

 toe, or insinuate that we are lost if an Ape has a 

 hippocampus minor. On the contrary, I have 

 done my best to sweep away this vanity. I have 

 endeavoured to show that no absolute structural 

 line of demarcation, wider than that between the 

 animals which immediately succeed us in the 

 scale, can be drawn between the animal world and 

 ourselves ; and I may add the expression of my 

 belief that the attempt to draw a psychical dis- 

 tinction is equally futile, and that even the 

 highest faculties of feeling and of intellect begin 

 to germinate in lower forms of life. 1 At the same 



1 It is so rare a pleasure for me to find Professor Owen's 

 opinions in entire accordance with my own, that I cannot for- 

 bear from quoting a paragraph which appeared in his Essay 

 "On the Characters, &c., of the Class Mammalia," in the 

 Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London for 

 1857, but is unaccountably omitted in the "Reade Lecture" 

 delivered before the University of Cambridge two years later 



