IN MODERN SCIENCE. 



143 



man and any other animal are so wide that they 

 warrant a distinction, not merely specific and 

 generic, but of a family and an ordinal cha- 

 racter. 



Perhaps the best way to appreciate this will 

 be to suppose that man has become extinct, 

 and that in some future geological period his 

 fossil remains are studied by some new race of 

 intelligent beings, and compared with those of 

 the lower animals his contemporaries. Let us 

 suppose that they have disinterred a human 

 skull or the bones of a human foot. From the 

 foot they would learn that man is not an arbo- 

 real animal, but intended to walk erect on the 

 ground. They could infer from this certain 

 structures and uses of the vertebral column 

 and of the anterior limbs different from those 

 found in apes, and which would certainly induce 

 them to conclude that they had obtained re- 

 mains indicating a new order of mammals. If 

 they had found the foot alone, they might doubt 

 whether the possessor of this strange and high- 

 ly-specialized organ had been carnivorous or 

 herbivorous, more nearly allied to the bears or 

 to the monkeys. Should they now find the 

 skull, these doubts would be solved, and they 

 would know that the new animal was some- 



