112 THE ARREST OF THE BODY. 



is not an interminable succession. It is not always a 

 becoming. Sometimes things arrive. The Lamp- 

 shells have arrived, they are part of the permanent 

 furniture of the world; along that particular line, 

 there will probably never be anything higher. The 

 Star-fishes also have arrived, and the Sea-urchins, and 

 the Nautilus, and the Bony Fishes, the Tapirs, and 

 possibly the Horse — all these are highly divergent 

 forms which have run out the length of their tether 

 and can go no further. When the plan of the world 

 was made, to speak teleologically, these types of life 

 were assigned their place and limit, and there they 

 have remained. If it were wanted to convey the im- 

 pression that Nature had some large end in view, that 

 she was not drifting aimlessly towards a general 

 higher level, it could not have been done more im- 

 pressively than by everywhere placing on the field of 

 Science these fixed points, these innumerable consum- 

 mations, these clean-cut mountain peaks, which for 

 millenniums have never grown. Even as there is a 

 plan in the parts, there is a plan in the whole. 



But the most certain of all these " terminal points " 

 in the evolution of Creation is the body of Man. 

 Anatomy places Man at the head of all other animals 

 that were ever made ; but what is infinitely more in- 

 structive, with him, as we have just seen, the series 

 comes to an end. Man is not only the highest branch, 

 but the highest possible branch. Take as a last wit- 

 ness the testimony of anatomy itself with regard to 

 the human brain. Here the fact is not only re- 

 affirmed but the rationale of it suggested in terms of 

 scientific law. " The development of the brain is in 

 connection with a whole system of development of the 



