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the simplest study of man’s nature reveals, at its foundations, 
all the selfish passions and fierce appetites of the merest 
quadruped? Is mother-love vile because a hen shows it, or 
fidelity base because dogs possess it ? 
The common sense of the mass of mankind will answer 
these questions without a moment’s hesitation. Healthy 
humanity, finding itself hard pressed to escape from real sin 
and degradation, will leave the brooding over speculative 
pollution to the cynics and the ‘ righteous overmuch’ who, 
disagreeing in everything else, unite in blind insensibility 
to the nobleness of the visible world, and in inability to appre« 
ciate the grandeur of the place Man occupies therein. 
Nay more, thoughtful men, once escaped from the blind- 
ing influences of traditional prejudice, will find in the lowly 
stock whence man has sprung, the best evidence of the 
splendour of his capacities; and will discern in his long pro- 
gress through the Past, a reasonable ground of faith in his 
attainment of a nobler Future. 
They will remember that in comparing civilized man with 
the animal world, one is as the Alpine traveller, who sees the 
mountains soaring into the sky and can hardly discern where 
the deep shadowed crags and roseate peaks end, and where 
the clouds of heaven begin. Surely the awe-struck voyager 
may be excused if, at first, he refuses to believe the geologist, 
who tells him that these glorious masses are, after all, the 
hardened mud of primeval seas, or the cooled slag of sub- 
terranean furnaces— of one substance with the dullest clay, but 
raised by inward forces to that place of proud and seemingly 
inaccessible glory. 
But the geologist is right; and due reflection on his teach- 
ings, instead of diminishing our reverence and our wonder, 
adds all the force of intellectual sublimity, to the mere 
esthetic intuition of the uninstructed beholder. 
And after passion and prejudice have died away, the same 
result will attend the teachings of the naturalist respecting 
