246 ON THE RELATIONS OF MAN 



of the ties which connect him with those singular creatures 

 whose history * has been sketched in the preceding pages. 



The importance of such an inquiry is indeed intuitively 

 manifest. Brought face to face with these blurred copies 

 of himself, the least thoughtful of men is conscious of a 

 certain shock, due perhaps not so much to disgust at the 

 aspect of what looks like an insulting caricature, as to the 

 awakening of a sudden and profound mistrust of time- 

 honoured theories and strongly-rooted prejudices regarding 

 his own position in nature, and his relations to the under- 

 world of life ; while that which remains a dim suspicion for 

 the unthinking, becomes a vast argument, fraught with the 

 deepest consequences, for all who are acquainted with the 

 recent progress of the anatomical and physiological sciences. 



I now propose briefly to unfold that argument, and to 

 set forth, in a form intelligible to those who possess no 

 special acquaintance with anatomical science, the chief 

 facts upon which all conclusions respecting the nature 

 and the extent of the bonds which connect man with the 

 brute world must be based : I shall then indicate the one 

 immediate conclusion which, in my judgment, is justified 

 by those facts, and I shall finally discuss the bearing of 

 that conclusion upon the hypotheses which have been 

 entertained respecting the Origin of Man. 



The facts to which I would first direct the reader's 

 attention, though ignored by many of the professed in- 

 structors of the public mind, are easy of demonstration 

 and are universally agreed to by men of science ; while 

 their significance is so great, that whoso has duly pondered 

 over them will, I think, find little to startle him in the 

 other revelations of Biology. I refer to those facts which 

 have been made known by the study of Development. 



It is a truth of very wide, if not of universal, application, 

 that every living creature commences its existence under 

 a form different from, ami simpler than, that which it 

 eventually attains. 



The oak is a more complex thing than the little rudi- 

 mentary plant contained in the acorn ; the caterpillar is 

 more complex than the egg ; the butterfly than the cater- 

 pillar ; and each of these beings, in passing from its rudi- 



* It will be understood that, in the preceding Essay, I have 

 selected for notice from the vast mass of papers which have been 

 written upon the man-like Apes, only those which seem to me to be 

 of snprinl moment. 



