84 PHYSICAL BASIS OF CIVILIZATION 



-upright attitude and, casteris paribus, the growth, 

 cultivation, preservation, and selection of an ever 

 more acute, more sensitive sense of touch is assured. 

 This, as above explained, assures multiplication of 

 primary impressions and close intimacies, and there- 

 fore an enormous expansion in the variety of our 

 conceptions and the range of our knowledge. No 

 other creature has this advantage; none ever could 

 possess it, without combining in its physique the 

 upright attitude, with the comparatively short arms, 

 fingers, thumbs, and hands as formed in the human 

 body. 



It is possible that to delicate differences in impres- 

 sions the sense of touch in bats, moles, elephants, 

 etc., may be as susceptible as man's and even more 

 so ; but to acquire knowledge of the nature of form, 

 size, of the dimensions of space, of the quantitative 

 and qualitative relations existing between different 

 parts of the same thing and between separate 

 entities, must be very difficult if not most frequently 

 impossible to creatures with a sense of touch, localized 

 either, as in the bats and moles, in the end of the 

 nose just above the anterior extremity of progna- 

 thous jaws, or, as in elephants, in a finger-like organ 

 at the end of the trunk. 



Observe the contrast between such a sense and 

 man's organ of touch! At each side of the body, 

 ordinarily less than two feet apart, are two jointed 

 compound levers: the arms. Each of these is 

 between two or three feet in length and has the 



