EXTENSIONS OF DARWINISM 305 



alities which lay hidden in protoplasm — the mysterious 

 physical basis of all life. To this vast series of herbs and 

 shrubs and forest-trees he owes most of the charms, the deli- 

 cacies, and the refinements of his existence — almost all his 

 fruits, most of his scents and savours, together with a large 

 part of the delight he experiences in mountain and valley, 

 forest, copse, and flower-spangled meadow, whieli everywhere 

 adorn his earthly dwelling-place. 



To this we must add the infinitely varied uses to man of 

 domestic animals, all supplied by the higher Mammalia or 

 birds, while no single reptile has ever occupied or seems able 

 to occupy the same place. We can only speculate on the part 

 these have played in man's full development, but it must have 

 been a great and an important one. The caring for cattle and 

 sheep, the use of milk, butter, and cheese, and the weaving 

 of wool and preparation of leather, must have all tended to 

 raise him from the status of a beast of prey to that of the 

 civilised being to whom some animals at all events became 

 helpers and friends. And this elevation was carried a step 

 further when the horse and the dog became the companions 

 of his daily life, while fowls, pigeons, and various singing- 

 birds added new pleasures and occupations to his home. That 

 such creatures should have been slowly evolved so as to reach 

 their full development at the very time when lie became able 

 to profit by them must surely be accepted as additional evi- 

 dence of a foreseeing mind which, from the first dawn of life 

 in the vegetable and animal cells, so directed and organised 

 that life, in all its myriad forms, as, in the far-off future, to 

 provide all that was most essential for the growth and develop- 

 ment of man's spiritual nature. 



In furtherance of this subject it would be necessary to put 

 a definite bar to the persistence of a lower type which might 

 have prevented or seriously checked the development of the 

 higher forms destined to succeed them ; and this seems to have 

 been done in the case of the ]^^esozoic reptiles by endowing 

 them with such a limited amount of intelligent vitalitv as 



