110 
At the same time, no one is more strongly convinced than 
I am of the vastness of the gulf between civilized man and 
the brutes; or is more certain that whether from them or not, 
he is assuredly not of them. No oneis less disposed to think 
lightly of the present dignity, or despairingly of the future 
hopes, of the only consciously intelligent denizen of this world. 
We are indeed told by those who assume authority in 
these matters, that the two sets of opinions are incompatible, 
and that the belief in the unity of origin of man and brutes 
involves the brutalization and degradation of the former. 
But is this really so? Could not a sensible child confute, 
by obvious arguments, the shallow rhetoricians who would 
force this conclusion upon us? Is it, indeed, true, that the 
Poet, or the Philosopher, or the Artist whose genius is the 
glory of his age, is degraded from his high estate by the 
undoubted historical probability, not to say certainty, that he 
is the direct descendant of some naked and bestial savage, 
whose intelligence was just sufficient to make him a little more 
cunning than the Fox, and by so much more dangerous than 
the Tiger? Oris he bound to howl and grovel on all fours 
because of the wholly unquestionable fact, that he was once 
an egg, which no ordinary power of discrimination could 
distinguish from that of a Dog? Or is the philanthropist or 
the saint to give up his endeavours to lead a noble life, because 
unaccountably omitted in the “ Reade Lecture” delivered before the University 
of Cambridge two years later, which is otherwise nearly a reprint of the paper 
in question. Prof. Owen writes : 
“Not being able to appreciate or conceive of the distinction between the 
psychical phenomena of a Chimpanzee and of a Boschisman or of an Aztec, with 
arrested brain growth, as being of a nature so essential as. to preclude a com- 
parison between them, or as being other than a difference of degree, I cannot 
shut my eyes to the significance of that all-pervading similitude of structure— 
every tooth, every bone, strictly homologous—which makes the determination 
of the difference between Homo and Pithecus the anatomist’s difficulty.” 
Surely it is a little singular, that the ‘anatomist,’ who finds it ‘difficult’ to 
‘determine the difference’ between Homo and Pithecus, should yet range them 
on anatomical grounds, in distinct sub-classes ! 
