LIFE ON THE EARTH. 145 



language has never got beyond a low grade, and is 

 represented by written characters as rude as the life 

 they depicture. Such men still keep superiority to 

 the animals around them ; but it is a feeble dominion, 

 and maintained by means which much resemble the 

 acts or instincts of brutes themselves. The interval is 

 lessened which separates them from the living world 

 below. 1 



Here, however, we must notice another specialty 

 of structure, whether original or derived, which has 

 largely aided in giving his superiority to man. This is 

 the human hand a member of the body well meriting 

 the valuable volume which has been written upon it. 

 As a subject for speculative thought it may be less im- 

 pressive than the one just discussed. But pursued into 

 details, it is pregnant with instruction as to those 

 methods through which man obtained his earliest 

 powers over matter, not solely in the common arts of 

 life, but even in those sciences which have raised him 

 so high in the scale of being. 



To sum up the results of all reasoning on the sub- 

 ject, they amount but to this, that there is a designed 

 plan in the totality of life on the globe, as it has been, 

 and as it now is that man enters as an integral part 

 into this plan and that progress towards higher grades 



1 There is a striking expression of William Humboldt on the hum^n 

 faculty of speech : ' Der Mensch ist nur Mensch durch Sprache. Urn aber 

 die Sprache zu erfinden miisste er schon Mensch seyn/ And elsewhere 

 he describes man as ' ein singendes Geschopf, aber den Gedanken mit den 

 Tonen verbindend.' 



The speculation regarding mutism as a step of transition between the 

 brute sounds of the anthropoid animals and the language of man is a 

 notion held only to fill up a gap in a theory. 



L 



