Zoology as Related to Evolution. 221 



when ideas should be the horns and arguments the jaws; 

 little that early batrachian, who called his mate to him with 

 a croak, foresee that his vocal faculty was to go on develop- 

 ing itself through human voices till it broke forth in the 

 eloquence of a Demosthenes, drove reform to its mark in the 

 sarcasm of a Phillips, and went up to heaven in a song the 

 angels might hush their own to hear of a Nilsson and an 

 Abbott. Love, with its mother tenderness and its sex-pas- 

 sion climbing in humanity to what splendors of poetry and 

 romance, has its root down how far amid the tenants of the 

 rocks. Society and its duties, and that "social contract" 

 about which philosophers have had so much to say, were 

 made for man by the Rousseaus and St. Simons of an ances- 

 try that went on all fours had already been in existence 

 millions of years at the period when the great Frenchman 

 thought of them as being formed, and can no more be over- 

 turned now than our human nature itself. A large part of 

 our moral uprightness antedates our walking physically up- 

 right. A few years ago a family on the Hudson, going away 

 for their summer vacation, left in their cellar a piece of meat 

 which they showed their pet dog as the food he was to live 

 on in their absence. The dog, however, mistook their gest- 

 ures and supposed it was food he was meant to guard. 

 Three weeks afterward, the family returning, found the 

 faithful creature's starved bones beside the untouched meat. 

 "Who does not wish that at least an equal share of the fidel- 

 ity which had thus come down to the little dog out of his 

 brute ancestry had descended to some of the bank presi- 

 dents and insurance-company trustees that are set to watch 

 people's financial meat? Even as regards religion, not from 

 the lips of angels, but very possibly from the insight of ani- 

 mals, did its first knowledge come. The terror they manifest 

 in the presence of objects which to them, are uncanny, as 

 when a horse shies at a bit of whirling paper or at anything 

 in motion whose propelling power he does not see, in spite of 

 the other explanations given of it, is impressively like the 

 dread which lies at the base of all savage worship and which 

 civilized man, his children especially, who repeat in so 

 many ways their far-off ancestral experience, feels in the 

 dark and" at the hearing of strange sounds. It suggests, 

 how inevitably, their common origin in a four-footed wor- 

 shiper who was their common progenitor is " a fear of the 

 Lord" starting in the awful shadow of primeval woods 

 that was the beginning of a wisdom which is to sing and 



