TO THE LOWEK ANIMALS. 129 



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

 their inclinations. 



But desiring, as 1 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, and 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 fel- 

 lowship 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 

 physical distinction is equally futile, and that even the 

 highest faculties of feeling and of intellect begin to germi- 

 nate 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 Characters, &c. of the Class Mammalia," 



in the ' Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London ' for 



6* 



