LEAF AND TENDRIL 



no doubt we might, approximately at least, deter- 

 mine the form in which it first dawned. The 

 higher anthropoid apes, which are, probably, a 

 lateral branch of the stem of the great biological 

 tree that bore man, show occasional gleams of it, 

 but reason, as we ascribe it to the lower orders, is 

 more a kind of symptomatic reason, a vague fore- 

 shadowing of reason rather than the substance it- 

 self. For a long time the child is without reason, 

 or any mental concepts, and all its activities are 

 reactions to stimuli, like those of an animal; it is 

 merely a bundle of instincts, but by and by it begins 

 to show something higher and we hail the dawn 

 of reason, and the child's development from the 

 animal plane into the human. 



The development of reason in the race of man 

 has of course been as gradual as the development of 

 his body from some lower animal form, but is it any 

 more startling or miraculous than those slow trans- 

 mutations or transformations which we trace every- 

 where in nature, and which in the end amount to 

 complete metamorphosis ? It is a new thing in the 

 animal world, and separates man from the lower 

 orders by an impassable gulf. The gulf has been 

 crossed in the past; not by a sudden leap, but 

 by slow growth and transmutation, just as the gulf 

 between the bird and reptile, or between the rep- 

 tile and the amphibian, has been crossed. Man is 

 separated from the lower orders less by a phys- 

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