222 Zoology as Related to Evolution. 



soar at last in what splendors of Christian day ! * And with 

 such inheritances, bodily and mental, received from animals, 

 is it not about time that the words brutal, beastly, and the 

 like, as designating what is worst in man, should have a 

 rest? The really brutal and beastly qualities we have de- 

 rived from them are often a hundredfold more and better 

 than the human ones that the persons thus described have 

 added to them since. Our animal infancy as a race is just 

 as honorable to us and just as worthy of being referred to 

 with tender regard as our animal infancy as individuals, the 

 two being exactly of a piece. And instead of making it our 

 aim, " working out the beast, to let the ape and tiger die," 

 ought we not rather to keep them in us tamed and civilized 

 as the beasts of burden to carry us on their backs, as no out- 

 ward ones can, in the long, long way our human nature is 

 yet to travel ? 



IV. It is a question which opens up into the last .and 

 crowning phase that zoology as interpreted by Darwin has 

 entered upon, and that is a morality that shall include ani- 

 mals as well as men among its objects and a religion that 

 shall save civilized brutes from the hell so many of them 

 are now in as well as savage heathen from the one they are 

 threatened with by and by. What hitherto has been only a 

 kindly sentiment warring against the wretched cruelty that 

 in so many forms they have been subject to is based by The 

 Origin of Species and The Descent of Man on a solid foun- 

 dation of science. Sharing with them the membership of 

 one larger animal body, we inevitably share with them also 

 the great Divine law, alike natural and scriptural, that " if 

 one member suffer, all the members suffer with it, and if 

 one member be honored, then all the members rejoice with 

 it." A lady, on getting a kitten for her little boy to play 



* It is a sensation that the deep woods, which, according to Darwin, were the 

 probable abode of man's immediate progenitors, seem to have pre-eminently the 

 power to produce. Who, when wandering alone under their stately arches, has 

 not felt in some degree its return a consciousness of something not found in the 

 open fields, creeping over even his civilized and perhaps skeptical nerves f It 

 suggests the reason why "the groves were God's first temples," and why Gothic 

 architecture has always been recognized as so specially consonant with the more 

 solemn forms of worship. And is it not also an explanation of the fear and cre- 

 dulity with regard to witches, hobgoblins, the Evil One, and an uncanny super- 

 natural presence that are so conspicuous an element in the second generation 

 of our New England ancestry the overpowering influence of the primeval forest, 

 sweeping the soul back to that brute sense of a more than earthly presence per- 

 vading it, in which religion began ? Subtle and wonderful the agencies and paths 

 which led the anthropoids of our race up to be men, their long sojourn in their 

 arboreal wilderness not only giving them their upright bodily attitude and devel- 

 oped hands, but awakening at the same time, as nothing else could, their germ 

 of soul, going so fitly with the hands and with the bodily uprightness. 



