TO THE LOWER ANIMALS 255 



enterprising traveller, overcoming the difficulties of space 

 and gravitation, has brought from that distant planet 

 for our inspection, well preserved, may be, in a cask of 

 rum. We should all, at once, agree upon placing him 

 among the mammalian vertebrates ; and his lower jaw, 

 his molars, and his brain, would leave no room for doubting 

 the systematic position of the new genus among those 

 mammals, whose young are nourished during gestation 

 by means of a placenta, or what are called the ' placental 

 mammals/ 



Further, the most superficial study would at once con- 

 vince us that, among the orders of placental mammals, 

 neither the Whales nor the hoofed creatures, nor the 

 Sloths and Ant-eaters, nor the carnivorous Gats, Dogs, 

 and Bears, still less the Rodent Rats and Rabbits, or the 

 Insectivorous Moles and Hedgehogs, or the Bats, could 

 claim our ' Homo ' as one of themselves. 



There would remain then, but one order for comparison, 

 that of the Apes (using that word in its broadest sense), 

 and the question for discussion would narrow itself to 

 this is Man so different from any of these Apes that 

 he must form an order by himself ? Or does he differ 

 less from them than they differ from one another, and 

 hence must take his place in the same order with them ? 



Being happily free from all real, or imaginary, personal 

 interest in the results of the inquiry thus set afoot, we 

 should proceed to weigh the arguments on one side and 

 on the other, with as much judicial calmness as if the 

 question related to a new Opossum. We should endeavour 

 to ascertain, without seeking either to magnify or diminish 

 them, all the characters by which our new Mammal differed 

 from the Apes ; and if we found that these were of less 

 structural value, than those which distinguish certain 

 members of the Ape order from others universally admitted 

 to be of the same order, we should undoubtedly place 

 the newly discovered tellurian genus with them. 



I now proceed to detail the facts which seem to me 

 to leave us no choice but to adopt the last mentioned course. 



It is quite certain that the Ape which most nearly 

 approaches man, in the totality of its organization, is 

 either the Chimpanzee or the Gorilla ; and as it makes 

 no practical difference, for the purposes of my present 

 argument, which is selected for comparison, on the one 



