Scientific Sophisms. 



yet that the organ which indicates that gulf is 

 his " nobler and more characteristic organ ; 

 some readers should relegate it to that category 

 in which he himself has placed a dictum of 

 Prof. Owen's, characterizing it as a "quci-qu- 

 versal proposition . . . which may be read 

 backwards, forwards, or sideways, with exactly 

 the same amount of signification." l 



8. But " qua-qua versal " as it is, it does not 

 stand alone. For after we have learned that 

 even when regarded on the lowest grounds, " the 

 pelvis, or bony girdle of the hips, of man is a 

 strikingly hwnan part of his organization," and 

 that his Brain is strikingly human in a much 

 higher degree, since it is his Brain, and not his 

 pelvis, which is " to furnish an explanation of 

 the great gulf which intervenes between the 

 lowest man and the highest ape m intellectual 

 power ; " we are told as if to neutralize this 

 concurrent testimony from "structure" and 

 from "substance," that "the difference in 

 weight of brain between the highest and lowest 

 man is far greater, both relatively and abso- 

 lutely, than that between the lowest man and 

 the highest ape." And, in a word, " whatever 

 system of organs be studied, the comparison of 

 their modifications in the ape series leads to one 

 1 Man's Place in Nature," p. 106. 



