128-(98) GRADATION IN ANIMAL LIFE. 



lar style of assigning grades, was still prevalent. Such, 

 gradation appears to have been founded on obvious, but 

 too superficial principles, and could only be very general 

 in its application. 



According to these old views one principle was as- 

 sumed as a postulate. Man, in every possible aspect, 

 physical as well as moral and intellectual, formed the 

 apex of the vast pyramid of beings. There stands, at 

 the very summit, his noble physical frame, the statu- 

 esque Jupiter of the ancients, in its most majestic de- 

 velopment, while the animal forms beneath him are less 

 perfect in their outlines. The more we depart from the 

 high typical organism of man, by so much lower do we 

 go in the scale. Man's flesh, in its tints and texture, is 

 refined ; that of the brutes is of a coarser grade ; his 

 sensibilities are exquisite ; theirs generally more gross 

 and dull. Starting from this view of man's position, 

 gradation was assigned to various types of animals very 

 much in accordance with their degree of approval to, or 

 departure from, what is noble in this highest type. 

 Animals, that had gifts enabling them to do things, 

 which, if done by man, would exercise his intellectual 

 powers of forethought and contrivance, were, naturally, 

 ranked high. Even the moral elements of human 

 character seemed to have a more or less feeble counter- 

 part in some families of the brute creation, to their popu- 

 lar elevation in grade. Thus the constructive skill of 

 the bee, and the industry of the ant have given them an 

 exalted rank since men began to observe and to record. 



In this crude way of grading animals, in which a poet 

 could theorize about as successfully as a scientist, the 

 question of size had a considerable bearing on the re- 

 sults. For as soon as animal organisms were reached 

 which were so diminutive that no differentiation of struc- 

 ture could be made by the human eye, they were all con- 

 signed to one common level, and that the very lowest, 

 under the name "animalcule." Manifestly, no other 

 course was possible as respects these little creatures, until 

 Leuwenhoek, near the beginning of the eighteenth cen- 

 tury, and then Gleichen, Muller, and at last Ehrenberg, 

 had microscopically resolved these animalcules into inde- 

 pendent sets of well-defined organisms. 



Rejecting the former crude methods of estimating 



