290 ON THE RELATIONS OF MAN 



Science has fulfilled her function \vlicn she has ascer- 

 tained and enunciated truth ; and were these pages ad- 

 dressed to men of science only, I should now close this 

 essay, knowing that my colleagues have learned to respect 

 nothing but evidence, and to believe that their highest 

 duty lies in submitting to it, however it may jar against 

 their inclinations. 



But desiring, as I do, to reach the wider circle of the 

 intelligent public, it would be unworthy cowardice were I 

 to ignore the repugnance with which the majority of my 

 readers are likely to meet the conclusions to which the 

 most careful and conscientious study I have been able to 

 give to this matter, has led me. 



On all sides I shall hear the cry " We are men and 

 women, not a mere better sort of apes, a little longer in 

 the leg, more compact in the foot, and bigger in brain 

 than your brutal Chimpanzees and Gorillas. The power 

 of knowledge the conscience of good and evil the 

 pitiful tenderness of human affections, raise us out of all 

 real fellowship with the brutes, however closely they may 

 seem to approximate us." 



To this I can only reply that the exclamation would be 

 most just and would have my own entire sympathy, if it 

 were only relevant. But, it is not I who seek to base 

 Man's dignity upon his great toe, or insinuate that we are 

 lost if an Ape has a hippocampus minor. On the con- 

 trary, I have done my best to sweep away this vanity. I 

 have endeavoured to show that no absolute structural line 

 of demarcation, wider than that between the animals 

 which immediately succeed us in the scale, can be drawn 

 between the animal world and ourselves ; and I may add 

 the expression of my belief that the attempt to draw a 

 psychical distinction is equally futile, and that even the 

 highest faculties of feeling and of intellect begin to germin- 

 ate in lower forms of life.* At the same time, no one is 



* It is so rare a pleasure for me to find Professor Owen's opinions 

 in entire accordance with my own, that I cannot forbear from 

 quoting a paragraph which appeared in his Essay " On the Char- 

 acters, etc., of the Class Mammalia," in the Journal of the Pro- 

 ceedings of the Linnean Society of London for 1857, but is un- 

 accountably omitted in the " Readc Lecture " delivered before the 

 University of Cambridge two years later, which is otherwise nearly 

 a reprint of the paper in question. Prof. Owen writes : 



" Not being able to appreciate or conceive of the distinction 

 between the psychical phenomena of a Chimpanzee and of a Boschis- 



