MAN. 423 



Man, besides the common properties of animals, has others 

 which raise him to an immense superiority. His mind is endowed 

 with powers of the highest order which brutes have not, and his 

 body, being, like the bodies of all animals, constituted in harmony 

 with the mind that the powers of the latter may have effect, 

 differs necessarily in many points of construction from the body 

 of every brute. Well might Shakspeare exclaim, " What a piece 

 of work is man ! How noble in reason ! how infinite in faculties ! 

 in form and moving how express and admirable ! in action how 

 like aft angel ! in apprehension how like a god ! the beauty of 

 the world ! the paragon of animals ! " * 



The orang-outangs approach the nearest of all brutes to the 

 human subject. Possessing expression of countenance, elevation 

 of forehead, and less projection of the lower part of the face than 

 other brutes, anterior extremities that are really arms and hands, 

 and teeth of the same number and pretty much of the same 

 figure as our own ; curious, imitative, covetous, social ; said by 

 some to place sentinels and dispose themselves in a train for the 

 propagation of alarm, to seem now and then to laugh and 

 weep,f to walk a little occasionally erect, to defend themselves 



the difference between our constitution and theirs, being a difference, not in 

 degree, but in kind. Perhaps this is the single instance, in which that regular 

 gradation which we, every where else, observe in the universe, fails entirely." 



Now the various kinds of animals do certainly run into each other ; no two 

 are so different but that discoveries are continnally made of a third intermediate. 

 But connection is not gradation. Many kinds, and the intermediate ones by 

 which they are united, are all on a level in point of excellence and combination 

 of properties, so that a single step in the gradation may comprehend a great 

 number of kinds : — the whole vegetable kingdom forms but one step. 



* Hamlet. Act. II. Sc. 2. 



t Le Cat (Traitd de VExistence du fiuide des nerfs. p. 35,) asserts that he 

 had seen the jocko or chimpans^ (simia troglodytes) both laugh and cry. The 

 reader of taste will remember the lines in Milton's Paradise Lost (ix.), — 



" Smiles from reason flow, 

 To brute denied." 



The orang-outangs lately exhibited at Exetcr-'Changc,— the one a satyrus and 



