HUMAN RESEMBLANCES TO LOWER LIFE. 17 



" paragon of animals," the evidences of that lower life gradually 

 began to pale and to disappear, as first the pre-human, and then the 

 human, characters were outlined. The projecting face-bones, still 

 seen to-day as a lingering survival in lower races of men, began to 

 be compressed and concentrated, as the work of making the " human 

 face divine" with its overhanging brain proceeded apace. The massive 

 teeth and muscles of lower life were gradually modified to form the 

 more modest structures our race exhibits to-day ; and the erect 

 posture, sustained without an effort, likewise began to be assumed as 

 a special feature of the developing tribes of humanity. This much 

 we can see by the lawful scientific use of the imagination in a back- 

 ward glance along the lines of the past. It would appear to the eye 

 of the biologist as though the human characters had been laid over 

 the features of the lower life that preceded them as if the picture of 

 humanity's progress had been painted over and upon the design 

 which the cumulative life of the vertebrate had furnished as a foun- 

 dation for the best and highest work of all. If such a simile holds 

 good, we might expect, in examining closely the latest figures on the 

 canvas, that here and there we should obtain a glimpse of the artist's 

 first outlines, and of the preliminary sketches which served for the 

 realisation of the more perfect ideal. As from the erasures and blots 

 of the finished manuscript, we may gain a clue to the genesis of th 

 writer's thoughts, so we may read between the lines of the warp and 

 woof of life, and may detect occasional glimpses of the fashioning of 

 lower types into that of humanity itself. The glimpses we do obtain, 

 are often blurred and indistinct, and their very nature is frequently 

 obscure. But there is no doubting the significance of the ancient 

 finger-posts which, half buried in the mists of antiquity or erased by 

 the busy fingers of time, still point the pathway along which man's 

 race has fought and won its way to the supremacy of the animal 

 hosts. 



It is in the study of the early phases of human development that 

 the most significant clues to man's past history are to be found. 

 Biological science in this respect but repeats the scientific methods 

 of common history ; and the genesis of human motives, ethical and 

 political, is most truly construed when the knowledge of their growth 

 and development is within the historian's grasp. A marked similarity 

 of development, then, is firstly found to characterise the earliest 

 phases of development throughout the vertebrate series. Human 

 existence steps forth upon the stage of time, potentially endowed 

 with the cumulative powers of its ancestry no doubt, but likewise 

 exhibiting a lowliness of actual garb and substance which places our 

 beginning at the veritable root stock of the tree of life. The earliest 

 germ of the human frame is a structureless mass of protoplasm, attain, 

 ing a diameter of the one-hundred- and-twentieth part of an inch, 



c 



