118 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



is clearly intelligible and ably stated ; the second is more of an 

 implication, but both are based on the belief of man's special 

 immortality ; and, although divines are found* who are willing to 

 extend the promise of a future life to the whole animal kingdom, 

 and have discovered texts to advocate that view, the Hebrew 

 Scriptures can scarcely be said to strongly support it. Even the 

 poor untutored Todas of India, who are alone valued as an 

 ethnological study, have at least a kinder and more sympathetic 

 heart for their cattle. The sum of their belief is, that they were 

 born — they and their cattle somehow rose out of the earth. 

 When they die they go to Amnor (the next world), which is a 

 world exactly like this, whither their Buffaloes join them, to 

 supply milk as in this state.! Sir Herbert Maxwell, in discussing 

 our obligations to wild animals, states, as a " remarkable and 

 perplexing fact, that neither the chosen people nor Christians are 

 bound by their religion to pay the slightest regard to the feelings 

 of animals. . . . There is not a word about mercy towards dumb 

 animals in the Sermon on the Mount ; not a word in all the 

 writings of the Fathers (so far as known to me) ; not a word, 

 apparently, from all the teachers of Christianity until we reach 

 the dawn of rationalism in the eighteenth century, when an 

 English country clergyman — the Rev. Mr. Grainger — scandalized 

 his congregation and jeopardized his reputation for orthodoxy by 

 preaching the duty of humane treatment of beasts and birds." \ 

 But if evolution is not a farce, and man has been derived from 

 more lowly ancestors, then the possession of a soul — using the 



* " Bishop Butler urges that every argument by which we maintain the 

 immortality of man is of equal validity to maintain the immortality of the 

 lower animals " (Canon Wilberforce). 



f W. E. Marshall, ' A Phrenologist among the Todas,' p. 125. — It is a 

 long flight from a Toda to an Agassiz, but we may quote the opinion of that 

 eminent and not undevout zoologist : — " Most of the arguments of philosophy 

 in favour of the immortality of man apply equally to the permanency of 

 this principle in other living beings. May I not add that a future life in 

 which man would be deprived of thatf great source of enjoyment and intel- 

 lectual and moral improvement which result from the contemplation of the 

 harmonies of the organic world would involve a lamentable loss ; and may 

 we not look to a spiritual concert of the combined worlds and all their 

 inhabitants in presence of their Creator as the highest conception of para- 

 dise ?" (' An Essay on Classification,' p. 99). 



I ' Blackwood's Magazine,' August, 1899, p. 228. 



