59 
But this is a process not unusually accompanied by many 
throes and some sickness and debility, or, it may be, by graver 
disturbances; so that every good citizen must feel bound 
to facilitate the process, and even if he have nothing but a 
scalpel to work withal, to ease the cracking integument to 
the best of his ability. 
In this duty lies my excuse for the publication of these 
essays. For it will be admitted that some knowledge of 
man’s position in the animate world is an indispensable pre- 
liminary to the proper understanding of his relations to the 
universe—and this again resolves itself, in the long run, into 
an inquiry into the nature and the closeness of the ties which 
connect him with those singular ereatures whose history* 
has been sketched in the preceding pages. 
The importance of such an inquiry is indeed intuitively 
manifest. Brought face to face with these blurred copies of 
himself, the least thoughtful of men is conscious of a certain 
shock, due perhaps, not so much to disgust at the aspect of 
what looks like an insulting caricature, as to the awakening 
of a sudden and profound mistrust of time-honoured theories 
and strongly-rooted prejudices regarding his own position in 
nature, and his relations to the under-world of life ; while that 
which remains a dim suspicion for the unthinking, becomes 
avast argument, fraught with the deepest consequences, for 
all who are acquainted with the recent progress of the anato- 
mical and physiological sciences. 
I now propose briefly to unfold that argument, and to set 
forth, in a form intelligible to those who possess no special 
acquaintance with anatomical science, the chief facts upon 
which all conclusions respecting the nature and the extent of 
the bonds which connect man with the brute world must be 
based: I shall then indicate the one immediate conclusion 
which, in my judgment, is justified by those facts, and I shall 
* Tt will be understood that, in the preceding Essay, I have selected for notice 
from the vast mass of papers which have been written upon the man-like Apes, 
only those which seem to me to be of special moment. 
