EXTENSIONS OF DARWINISM 283 



his fruits, most of his scents and savours, together with a 

 large part of the delight he experiences in mountain and 

 valley, forest, copse, and flower-spangled meadow, which 

 everywhere adorn his earthly dwelling-place. 



To this we must add the infinitely varied uses to man 

 of domestic animals, all supplied by the higher Mammalia or 

 birds, while no single reptile has ever occupied or seems able 

 to occupy the same place. We can only speculate on the 

 part these have played in man's full development, but it 

 must have been a great and an important one. The caring 

 for cattle and sheep, the use of milk, butter, and cheese, and 

 the weaving of wool and preparation of leather, must have 

 all tended to raise him from the status of a beast of prey to 

 that of the civilised being to whom some animals at all 

 events became helpers and friends. And this elevation was 

 carried a step further when the horse and the dog became 

 the companions of his daily life, while fowls, pigeons, and 

 various singing-birds added new pleasures and occupations 

 to his home. That such creatures should have been slowly 

 evolved so as to reach their full development at the very 

 time when he became able to profit by them must surely be 

 accepted as additional evidence of a foreseeing mind which, 

 from the first dawn of life in the vegetable and animal cells, 

 so directed and organised that life, in all its myriad forms, as, 

 in the far-off future, to provide all that was most essential 

 for the growth and development of man's spiritual nature. 



In furtherance of this object it would be necessary to 

 put a definite bar to the persistence of a lower type which 

 might have prevented or seriously checked the development 

 of the higher forms destined to succeed them ; and this 

 seems to have been done in the case of the Mesozoic 

 reptiles by endowing them with such a limited amount of 

 intelligent vitality as would not lead to its automatic 

 increase under the stress of a long course of development, 

 though accompanied by continual change of conditions and 

 enormous increase in size. Hence the " ridiculously small 

 brains " (as they have been termed) of these huge and 

 varied animals. We may learn from this phenomenon, and 

 the parallel case of the huge Dinocerata among the Tertiary 

 mammals, that development of a varied form and structure 



