TO THE LOWER ANIMALS 287 



to the lowest, smallest, and least intelligent of the placental 

 Mammalia. It is as if nature herself had foreseen the 

 arrogance of man, and with Roman severity had provided 

 that his intellect, by its very triumphs, should call into 

 prominence the slaves, admonishing the conqueror that he 

 is but dust. 



These are the chief facts, this the immediate conclusion 

 from them to which I adverted in the commencement 

 of this Essay. The facts, I believe, cannot be disputed ; 

 and if so, the conclusion appears to me to be inevitable. 



But if Man be separated by no greater structural barrier 

 from the brutes than they are from one another then it 

 seems to follow that if any process of physical causation 

 can be discovered by which the genera and families of 

 ordinary animals have been produced, that process of 

 causation is amply sufficient to account for the origin 

 of Man. In other words, if it could be shown that the 

 Marmosets, for example, have arisen by gradual modifica- 

 tion of the ordinary Platyrhini, or that both Marmosets 

 and Platyrhini are modified ramifications of a primitive 

 stock then, there would be no rational ground for doubt- 

 ing that man might have originated, in the one case, by 

 the gradual modification of a man-like ape ; or, in the 

 other case, as a ramification of the same primitive stock 

 as those apes. 



At the present moment, but one such process of physical 

 causation has any evidence in its favour ; or, in other 

 words, there is but one hypothesis regarding the origin 

 of species of animals in general which has any scientific 

 existence that propounded by Mr. Darwin. For Lamarck, 

 sagacious as many of his views were, mingled them with 

 so much that was crude and even absurd, as to neutralize 

 the benefit which his originality might have effected, had 

 he been a more sober and cautious thinker ; and though 

 I have heard of the announcement of a formula touching 

 " the ordained continuous becoming of organic forms," it 

 is obvious that it is the first duty of a hypothesis to be 

 intelligible, and that a qua-qu&-versal proposition of this 

 kind, which may be read backwards, or forwards, or side- 

 ways, with exactly the same amount of signification, does 

 not really exist, though it may seem to do so. 



At the present moment, therefore, the question of the 

 relation of man to the lower animals resolves itself, in 



