1883. ] Man's Place in Nature. 1005 
Strangest of all arguments in proof of man’s structural infe- 
riority is that which declares the upright face to be inferior to the 
projecting snout, only for the reason that in the embryo the face is 
formed beneath the fore-brain, a position permanently retained in 
man. “The projecting snout,” says Dr. Minot, “is a higher struc- 
ture than the retreating human face.” So be it; the baboon has 
more of this higher structure than we have, the ant-eater excels the 
baboon, and the pipe fish and gar fish are ahead of both. Let 
us bow the knee before our superiors. 
The persistence of an embryonal character is not of itself any 
proof of degradation, and when the lack of the brute snout is 
correlated with a high development of brain, it becomes evident 
that the total is a structural advance. 
We need not ask morphologists or embryologists whether man 
is the highest animal. We have the proof of it every hour be- 
fore our eyes. His powers of mind are the resultant of his struc- 
ture, and have enabled him to conquer all other beings in the 
Struggle of life. That animal is highest which possesses the 
widest range of faculties. This man undoubtedly does; no other 
animal has the power, by voice or pen, to exaggerate or depre- 
Ciate its own importance; no other animal can use the powers of 
‘Nature as he; no other can produce works which are propor- 
tionately comparable to his; and if, therefore, morphology or 
embryology contradict the facts of life, then are those sciences 
unsafe guides, as they certainly are only partial ones. 
But it may reasonably be doubted whether either morphology 
or embryology sustain the position assumed by some enthusiastic 
Students of those branches of biology. 
Assertions of man’s animal inferiority are but the result of a 
too violent reaction against the thoroughly untenable but far from 
obsolete idea that man does not belong to the animal kingdom 
at all, but is, by virtue of his soul, a being sublimely above all 
others upon the earth—a being for whose benefit or pleasure the 
earth itself, and all organic life upon it, were divinely prepared. 
Only a part of man’s superiority is morphological, for mental 
Or, as styled by Spencer, super-organic evolution does not enter 
into the domain of morphology. Yet this mental evolution can 
only be maintained, and could only have been gained, by the aid 
of the most varied bodily relations with the outer world—rela- 
i : 
AMERICAN NATURALIST, 1882, p. 511. 
