THE PRINCIPLES OP RANK AMONG ANIMALS. 



35 



may often correct false impressions or mistakes ; but the animal 

 really depends for its rank on its intrinsic position in nature, and 

 not on the summation of different zoological characters. Thus, in 

 actual fact, man's place in nature is altogether apart, and on a 

 higher level from that of all other beings. This is our real axiom. 

 To explain it, or measure it, we may then proceed to take into 

 consideration his different characters in comparison with those of 

 other animals ; but these are in themselves explanatory, not domi- 

 nant. Some individual characters may approximate, but because 

 they do, we have no right to argue that the animals themselves are 

 equally approximate in rank, or necessarily approximate at all. 

 Even if we found that the sum of all acknowledged characters were 

 approximate in any two animals, we should not have proved that 

 those animals as animals were necessarily close in rank, unless we 

 had confirmatory evidence that they were so jper se ; for some 

 characters might have escaped observation, which would have 

 made all the difference. This point may be abundantly illustrated 

 from the comparative zoology of the lower animals, and still more 

 so from palaeontology, where species have constantly to be decided 

 from very imperfect data. May I take an instance from the 

 Brachiopoda, which I have been recently studying. Palaeozoic 

 Atrypas and Rhynchonellas have frequently been classed together, 

 because the sums of their external characters are almost exactl 

 the same ; but when their internal characters are discovered a wide 

 difference is at once discernible. So again some fossils of the 

 genera Terebratula, Glassia, Centronella, and Athyris while totally 

 differing in internal structure, are externally so similar that they 

 have been apparently all accounted a single species, that is, of one 

 rank, before their interiors were discovered. That is to say, the 

 summation of all known characters in two animals may be the 

 same, and yet their real rank be very different. We may now 

 apply these principles to the animals. We see some which are 

 closely approximate in all acknowledged zoological characters, but 

 which are yet in themselves of very different rank in the true 

 order of nature. Why is this ? Because other sets of characters 

 must have escaped our summation. That is to say, there is a 

 vacancy for other characters besides those of ordinary zoological 

 calculation in deciding an animal's rank. Thus, turning to the 

 difference between the rank of man, and of the anthropoids, we 

 find it actually very far greater than can be accounted for by mere 

 zoological characters. Hence there is a vacancy for an ' unknown 



