32 



PROFESSOR HENRY WEBSTER TARKER^ ON 



diminished or massed in Clamatores, or reduced to fewer 

 pairs in lower gTonps) would not be thought of as entitling 

 their possessors to the first place but for the power of song 

 connected with the more complicated apparatus. The social 

 instincts of the Hymenoptera are among the characters that 

 determine grade. Certainly, the naturalist who is strictly 

 naturalistic should look upon all developments of man as 

 having weight in a natural system — human architecture as 

 no less to be considered than honey- comb, human music no 

 less than a^aan, human society no less than that of an ant- 

 hill ; he should place man apart according to the totality of 

 his peculiar manifestations. The strained likeness to the 

 ape's habits is shown in trying to make something of the 

 brute's bed, sleeping position, and use of sticks and stones; 

 how lucky it would have been if monkey or ape had made 

 such constructive use of material as the tailor-bird, the 

 bower-bird, the turret-building species of tarantula, or the 

 case-building caddis worm ! The materialist, a fortiori, 

 cannot consistently shut out the human mind and its 

 developments, since in his view these are animal w^holly. 



Concerning man, this paper has said nothing of soul, of 

 spirit. Yet even here the tables may be turned. Aside from 

 any idea of spiritual substance or immortal essence, the 

 spiritual, as a writer has explained, is the moral, in all its 

 height and breadth. If, then, there are in animals the germs of 

 everything human, as now claimed apparently half in earnest 

 and half in jest, — if monkeys have an "indefinite morality," 

 and dogs a religion, and a scientific book can query whether 

 ants are "moral and accountable," — why, in considering man's 

 place in nature, exclude his crowning glory as the only creature 

 with full-orbed moral perception and responsibility, as far 

 from apes as from dogs or even ants. The truth is that in 

 everything except the " Primate " classification, the new 

 science takes into account every slightest thing that is, and 

 a vast deal that has no existence. 



Man, it has been well said, begins a new series. He stands 

 alone, erect, godlike, not so much in the pyramid of life as on 

 its summit. And as every lofty summit of earth is overhung 

 by shining clouds, as if the soul of the hills had risen high 

 above, so to the vision of reasonable faith there is another 

 series of hfe, the spiritual, the glorified, of which man is the 

 beginning. 



