38 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. 



animal forms being as perfectly adapted to their requirements as 

 man's is for his ; the term ' perfect ' being conditional on purpose 

 and use. 



The plan of structure in animal forms is one, modified in 

 detail for the various functions of each. It is also one of gradations, 

 the lower forms having few organs, and these performing functions 

 of the simplest kind- As we rise in the scale of being, the organs 

 are more numerous, and capable of performing a greater number 

 of operations, until we reach man, whom science places at the head 

 of the list, because he has the most highly developed and complex 

 organization, capable of performing the greatest diversity of" oper- 

 ations of any animal form on the globe. Now, the gradations 

 rising through so many forms^ the differences are necessarily slight 

 in each, but they are not arranged on a uniform cumulative 

 principle ; that is, the one above is not always in every part in 

 advance of the one below. 



Science gathers all animated organisms into groups, each group 

 with some distinguishing characteristic; these groups are one 

 higher than the other, but in passing from one to the other there is 

 often a great descent from the highest of the one to the lowest of 

 the next above. Thus they overlap one another, and in the groups 

 there is often great* difficulty found to assign each individual its 

 proper place, from the fact that an individual that seems to be low 

 down in the group has something in its organization that would 

 rightly place it much higher in the scale. This is finely illustrated 

 in the case of the apes. These run from an exact resemblance 

 with some of the lower Mammalia to a striking resemblance to man. 

 Now it has been demonstrated by the strictest scientific anatomy 

 that some of the lower forms of the apes have in their skeleton 

 bones more distinctively human than are to be found in some of 

 the higher ones ; that the peculiarly human portion in the lower is 

 often dropped in the one above, and another equally human taken 

 up, no cumulative advance being made ; so that, although the entire 

 human skeleton may be found in perfection in the ape family it is 

 not found combined in any single portion of it. And it is this 

 combination that secures to man his rightful pre-eminence in 

 scientific classification. 



Again, science finds man to have a mental faculty. Of mind, 

 pure and simple, science knows nothing ; it obtains evidence of its 



