40 MAN: 



intermediate forms wHch are either still existing or 

 belong to bygone geological periods. 



Man's structural connection with, the vertebrate 

 plan is inseparable ; and while he is admittedly the 

 highest form in the scale of created being, yet he is 

 physically possessed of nothing that is not typified 

 and existing in degree in the lower animals. Homo- 

 logous parts of the vertebrate skeleton are common 

 to fish, reptile, bird, and mammal — the fin to swim, 

 the limb to creep, the wing to fly, and the hand to 

 grasp. As we ascend the mammalian scale, the 

 resemblance becomes closer and closer, till at last, in 

 man and the forms immediately below him, we find 

 organ for organ, bone for bone, muscle for muscle, and 

 nerve for nerve — the resemblances, in fine, far more 

 striking than the differences. There may be a process 

 on a bone of the one more prominent than the process 

 on the corresponding bone of the other ; or there may 

 be a section of the brain of the one less conspicuous 

 than that in the brain of the other ; but no honest and 

 competent anatomist refuses on grounds like these to 

 admit the identity of parts or the oneness of the plan 

 upon which both are constructed.* DifiFerences there 



* " Not being able," says the most distinguished of British 

 anatomists, " to appreciate or oonceire of the distinctness 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 



