Jan. li^ 1S77] 



NA TURE 



221 



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about him are of a remote character, that his origin is 

 recent, his duration likely to be short, and that he is the 

 great central figure round which other things in this 

 world revolve. But this is not what the biologist tells us. 

 At the present moment you will be kind enough to separate 

 me from them, because it is in no way essential to my 

 argument just now that I should advocate their views. 

 Don't suppose that I am saying this for the purpose of 

 escaping the responsibility of their beliefs, because at 

 other times and in other places I do not think that point 

 has been left doubtful ; but I want clearly to point out to 

 you that for my present argument they may all be wrong ; 

 nevertheless, my argument will hold good. The biologists 

 tells us that all this is an entire mistake. They turn to 

 the physical organisation of man. They examine his 

 whole structure, his bony frame, and all that clothes it. 

 They resolve him into the finest particles into which the 

 microscope will enable them to break him up. They 

 consider the performance of his various functions and 

 activities, and they look at the manner in which he occurs 

 on the surface of the world. Then they turn to other ani- 

 mals and taking the first handy domestic animal — say a 

 dog — they profess to be able to demonstrate that the 

 analysis of the dog leads them, in gross, to precisely the 

 same results as the analysis of the man ; that they find 

 almost identically the same bones, having the same rela- 

 tions ; that they can name the muscles of the dog by the 

 names of the muscles of the man, and the nerves of 

 the dog by those of the nerves of the man, and that 

 such structures and organs of sense as we find in the 

 man such also we find in the dog ; they analyse the brain 

 and spinal cord, and they find that the nomenclature which 

 fits the one answers for the other. They carry their 

 microscopic inquiries in the case of t>.e dog as far as 

 they can, and they find that his body is resolvable into 

 the same elements as those of the man. Moreover, they 

 trace back the dog's and the man's development, and they 

 find that, at a certain stage of their existence, the two 

 creatures are not distinguishable the one from the other ; 

 they find that the dog and his kind have a certain distri- 

 bution over the surface of the world comparable in its 

 way to the distribution of the human species. What is 

 true of the dog they tell us is true of all the higher 

 animals ; and they assert that for the whole of these crea- 

 tures they can lay down a common plan, and regard the 

 man and the dog, and the horse and the ox as mmor mo- 

 difications of one great fundamental unity. Moreover, 

 the investigations of the last three-quarters of a century 

 have proved, they tell us, that similar inquiries carried 

 out through all the different kinds of animals which are 

 met with in nature will lead us, not in one straight series, 

 but by many roads, step by step, gradation by gradation, 

 from man, at the summit, to specks of animated jelly at 

 the bottom of the series ; so that the idea of Leibnitz 

 and of Bonnet, that animals form a great scale of being, 

 in which there are a series of gradations from the most 

 complicated form to the lowest and simplest ; that idea, 

 though not exactly in the form in which it was propounded 

 by those philosophers, turns out to be substantially correct. 

 More than this, when biologists pursue their investigations 

 into the vegetable world, they find that they can, in the 

 same way, follow out the structure of the plant from the 

 most gigantic and complicated trees down, through a 

 similar series of gradations, until they arrive at specks 

 of animated jelly, which they are puzzled to distinguish 

 from those specks which they reached by the animal road. 



Thus, biologists have arrived at the conclusion that a 

 fundamental uniformity of structure pervades the animal 

 and vegetable worlds, and that plants and animals differ 

 from one another simply as modifications of the same 

 great general plan. 



Agam, they tell us the same story in regard to the study 

 of function. They admit the large and important inter- 

 val which, at the present time, separates the manifesta- 



tions of the mental faculties observable in the higher 

 forms of mankind, and even in the lower forms, such as 

 we know them, mentally from those exhibited by other ani- 

 mals ; but, at the same time, they tell us that the foun- 

 dations or rudiments of almost all the faculties of man 

 are to be met with in the lower animals ; that there is a 

 unity of mental faculty as well as of bodily structure, and 

 that, here also, the difference is a difference of degree and 

 not of kind. I said "almost all,"for a reason.* Among the 

 many distinctions which have been drawn between the 

 lower creatures and ourselves, there is one which is hardly 

 ever insisted on,^ but which may be very fitly spoken of 

 in a place so largely devoted to art as that in which 

 we are assembled. It is this, that while among various 

 kinds of animals it is possible to discover traces of 

 all the other faculties of man, especially the faculty of 

 mimicry, yet that particular form of mimicry which shows 

 itself in the imitation of form either by modelling or 

 by drawing is not to be met with. As far as I know, 

 there is no sculpture or modelling, and decidedly no 

 painting or drawing, of animal origin. I mention the 

 fact, in order that such comfort may be derived therefrom 

 as artists may feel inclined to take. 



If what the biologists tell us is true, it will be needful 

 for us to get rid of our erroneous conceptions of man and 

 of his place in nature, and substitute right ones for them. 

 But it is impossible to form any judgment as to whether 

 the biologists are right or wrong unless we are able to 

 appreciate the nature of the arguments which they have 

 to offer. 



One would almost think that this was a self-evident 

 proposition. I wonder what a scholar would say to the 

 man who should undertake to criticise a difficult passage 

 in a Greek play but who obviously had not acquainted 

 himself with the rudiments of Greek grammar. And yet 

 before giving positive opinions about these high questions 

 of Biology people not only don't seem to think it necessary 

 to be acquainted with the grammar of the subject, but 

 they have not even mastered the alphabet. You find criti- 

 cism and denunciation showered about by persons who 

 not only have not attempted to go through the discipline 

 necessary to enable them to be judges, but have not even 

 reached that stage of emergence from ignorance in which 

 the knowledge that such a disciphne is necessary dawns 

 upon the mind. I have had to watch with some atten- 

 tion — in fact I have been favoured with a good deal of 

 it myself — the sort of criticism with which biologists and 

 biological teachings are visited. I am told every now and 

 then that there is a " brilliant article " ^ in so-and-so, in 

 which we are all demolished. I used to read these things 

 once, but I am getting old now, and I have ceased to 

 attend very much to this cry of " wolf." When one does 

 read any of these productions, what one finds generally, 

 on the face of it, is that the brilliant critic is devoid of 

 even the elements of biological knowledge, and that his 

 brilliancy is like the light given out by the crackling of 

 thorns under a pot of which Solomon speaks. So far as 

 I recollect Solomon makes use of that image for purposes 

 of comparison ; but I won't proceed further into that 

 matter. 



Two things must be obvious : in the first place, that 

 every man who has the interests of truth at heart must 

 earnestly desire that every well-founded and just criticism 

 that can be made should be made ; but that, in the second 

 place, it is essential to anybody's being able to benefit by 

 criticism that the critic should know what he is talking 

 about and be in a position to form a mental image of the 

 facts symbolised by the words he uses. If not, it is as 

 obvious in the case of a biological argument as it is in that 



1 I think that Prof. AUman was the first to draw attention to it. 



2 Galileo was troubled by a .sort of people whom he called "paper philo- 

 sophers," because they fancied that the true reading of n.-iture was to be 

 detected by the collation of texts. The race is not extinct, but, as of old, 

 brings forth its " winds of doctrine " by which the weathercock heads among 

 us are much exercised. 



