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and enunciated truth; and were these pages addressed to 
men of science only, I should now close this essay, knowing 
that my colleagues have learned to respect nothing but 
evidence, and to believe that their highest duty lies in sub- 
mitting to it, however it may jar against their inclinations. 
But desiring, as I 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 aré 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, 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 fellowship 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 contrary, I have 
done my best to sweep away this vanity. I have endea- 
voured to show that no absolute structural line of demar- 
cation, wider than that between the animals which imme- 
diately 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 psychical distinction 
is equally futile, and that even the highest faculties of feeling 
and of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of life.* 
* Tt 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 
‘ Jownal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London’ for 1857, but is 
