112 WALTER AUBREY KIDD^ M.D., M.E.C.S., F.Z.S.^ ON 



genus homo from the other groups of the Anthropoidea more 

 notably than any speciHc physical character. On the theistic, 

 no less than the scientific, theory of things, "Nature's great 

 progression " from the inorganic to the organic, the formless to 

 the formed, the simple to the complex, the protozoa to man, 

 exhibits manifold degrees of feeling and thought. The senses, 

 intellect, and will show themselves with increasing detiniteness 

 throughout the great ascending scale of being up to man, and 

 not to man as one of the genera of the anthropoidea, which, in 

 the glacial period, might perhaps have sufficed for his classifica- 

 tion ; but to modern man, though not to modern man alone, but 

 modern Western civilised and scientific man. What chasms 

 there are, not only in physical characteis, but in mental ascent, 

 from protozoa to metazoa, from invertebrates to vertebrates, 

 and from the earliest of these to man ! It would be hardly 

 more strange than sad that ever an " excelsior " should mark 

 the ascent of animal mind, that it should be crowned iu the 

 noble attributes of man, that the topmost branches and finest 

 fruit of the tree of knowledge which has grown up and round 

 and in him should culminate in this refined and well-informed 

 character of conscience, this chiefest taxononiic distinction of 

 the genus homo, and that the last great fruit of a long evolution 

 should be a fatal illusion — a will-o'-the-wisp which has led him 

 far from the safe and solid ground of nature and her phenomena 

 into the regions of religion, morality, and etliical goodness. 

 This strange " illusion " has at any rate been the efficient 

 factor in the course of human evolution which has availed to 

 prevent the earth from becoming a shambles, and its highest 

 ideals no more than those of hunger and animal love. Is it, 

 can it be, the part of Science to destroy with pitiless logic and 

 triumphant discoveries in her own sphere the supremacy of the 

 moral law in the hearts and minds of educated men ; to show 

 that, however useful in the childhood of man has heen the 

 assumed relation of the moral law to the Unseen and Infinite 

 Being, it must now be discarded as a creed outworn, and that 

 now under the newer regulative system which Mr. Herbert 

 Spencer declared to be the pressing need of the age, the laws of 

 comfort shall be the laws of conduct ? One can but remark 

 here that if the links of man with the Infinite Being, postulated 

 by the theistic jjosition, be the childish illusion which the 

 agnostic declares it to be, it is the only phenomenon recorded 

 in the book of nature and the history of mankind, of a vast 

 benefaction co man and his subject creation being produced 

 by fancy and promoted by fraud. Taking the ground of 



