THE HUMAN KINGDOM. 11 



gence. It is an opinion adopted and defended to the last by a 

 learned man, to whoso memory we cannot, en passant, prevent 

 ourselves from rendering the homage which is his due, Isidore 

 Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. We find in the second volume of 

 his Histoire Naturelle Generate, almost a return to Carte- 

 sian ideas. According to him animals do not think, they 

 possess only that sensibility that plants have not.* And the 

 celebrated naturalist agreed with the adoption of a human 

 kingdom, appearing as the crowning-point of the organic and 

 inorganic kingdoms, f and as distinct from the second as this 

 is from the third. 



Before proceeding further, we may be permitted to make 

 one preliminary remark. We may thus declare it : 



PROPOSITION. Man nearly approaches the Anthropomorphous 

 Apes in his Physical Organism. Whether one is a partisan or 

 not of the " Human Kingdom," this resemblance is a fact 

 which it will be in no person's ideas to contest. And it is not 

 merely in the external forms ; we find it even greater if, going 

 to the foundation of the facts, we give our attention to the 

 essential parts composing the body, to the anatomical ele- 

 ments, to those delicate particles visible only in the micro- 

 scope, and which always show, among animals of tho same 

 group, a marvellous uniformity. 



It is here where, if not an impossibility, at least a sort of 

 contradiction presents itself to the defenders of the " human 

 kingdom;" for there are two organisms, scarcely different, at 

 the service of two directing powers, of two intelligences abso- 

 lutely and radically dissimilar. Doubtless all tho forces of 

 organised matter are not known to us, but does not this 

 resemblance, though even a superficial one, surprise us ; and 

 does it not seem that every organism constituted directly by 

 reason of the influences which it is qualified to receive or to 



* See those ideas categorically explained, vol. ii, p. 281. 



f M. de Quatrefages admits a sidereal kingdom ; and such a thesis seems 

 to us a very difficult one to sustain, after the experiments of Bunsen and 

 Kirchoff on the chemical composition of the stars. M. de Quatrefages ad- 

 mits also a human kingdom; but admitting that animals think, he makes 

 morality and religion characteristics of this kingdom. Unite de I'Espdce Hu- 

 maine, 1861, p. 30. Wo shall have occasion to revert again to those two 

 points. See Bert., Bulletins de la Societt d' Anthropologie, August 7, 1862. 



