ON THE RELATIONS OF MAN TO THE 

 LOWER ANIMALS 



Multis videri poterit, majorem esse differentiam Simiae et Hominis, 

 quam diei et noctis ; verum tamen hi, comparatione instituta inter 

 summos Europae Heroes et Hottentottos ad Caput bonse spei de- 

 gentes, difllcillime sibi persuadebunt, has eosdem habere natales ; 

 vel si virginem nobilem aulicam, maxime comtam et humanissimam, 

 conferre vellent cum homine sylvestri et sibi relicto, vix augurari 

 possent, hunc et illam ejusdem esse speciei. Linnsei Amoenitates 

 Acad. " Anthropomorpha." 



THE question of questions for mankind the problem 

 which underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting 

 than any other is the ascertainment of the place which 

 Man occupies in nature and of his relations to the universe 

 of things. Whence our race has come ; what are the 

 limits of our power over nature, and of nature's power 

 over us ; to what goal we are tending ; are the problems 

 which present themselves anew and with undiminished 

 interest to every man born into the world. Most of us, 

 shrinking from the difficulties and dangers which beset the 

 seeker after original answers to these riddles, are contented 

 to ignore them altogether, or to smother the investigating 

 spirit under the featherbed of respected and respectable 

 tradition. But, in every age, one or two restless spirits, 

 blessed with that constructive genius, which can only build 

 on a secure foundation, or cursed with the mere spirit of 

 scepticism, are unable to follow in the well-worn and com- 

 fortable track of their forefathers and contemporaries, and 

 unmindful of thorns and stumbling-blocks, strike out into 

 paths of their own. The sceptics end in the infidelity which 

 asserts the problem to be insoluble, or in the atheism which 

 denies the existence of any orderly progress and governance 

 of things : the men of genius propound solutions which 

 grow into systems of Theology or of Philosophy, or veiled 

 in musical language which suggests more than it asserts, 

 lake the shape of the Poetry of an epoch. 



