208 MAMMALIAN DESCENT. [Lect. IX. 



the great pro-cosmic beginning, when the foundation 

 was formed of the earth nascent, when the sea was 

 born, and had the soft clouds for its swaddling-bands ; 

 and 2nd, the lesser protoplasmic beginning, the first 

 budding of the tiny germ of the individual human 

 being. This latter is a historical repetition of the 

 former, — it is the beginning of but one among many 

 millions of kinds that developed from the first great pro- 

 toplasmic root of organisation; but that one explains all 

 the others — gives the reason of existence for all the others. 



You may put the whole organic world into two 

 categories if you like, Man on one hand, and all other 

 living forms, vegetable and animal, on the other ; thus 

 you have Man and not Man. 



Now nature seems to have loved the former more 

 than the latter ; by election she has made him heir of 

 all eternity; she has taken, so to speak, one tribe of 

 creatures from the midst of the other tribes, and set 

 them on high above them all, so that they have become 

 a "peculiar people," bringing all the rest into sub- 

 jection to themselves, either killing them outright, or, 

 if permitting them to live, making them hewers of 

 wood and drawers of water. But this killing and 

 culling goes on with the human family, the strong 

 and the wise destroying the weak and the foolish; 

 and looked at from one standpoint, this race seems to be 

 only an improvement upon the unreasoning races by its 

 superior skill in the art of destruction. 



