MAN AND THE INFERIOR ANIMALS. 
629 
their companions. The attachment, indeed, of a mother to her 
offspring, so long as its wants and feebleness require her aid and 
protection, is as powerful in the lower animals as in the human 
species; but its duration, in the former case, is confined, even in 
the most social tribes, to the period of helplessness ; and the 
animal instinct is not succeeded, as.in man, by continued inter- 
course of affection and kind offices, and those endearing rela- 
tions of kindred, which are the sources of the purest happiness 
of life. 
While nature has apparently frowned on the birth of man, and 
brought him into the world weak, naked, and defenceless, 
unprovided with the means of subsistence, and exposed on every 
side to destruction, she has in reality implanted in him the germ 
of future greatness. The helplessness of the infant calls forth 
the fostering care and tenderest affections of the mother, and 
lays the deep foundation of the social union. The latent energies 
of his mind and body are successively, though slowly, developed. 
While the vital organs are actively engaged in the execution 
of their different offices — while the digestive apparatus is exer- 
cising its powerful chemistry — while myriads of minute arteries, 
veins, and absorbents are all indefatigably at work in building 
and modelling this complex frame, the sentient principle is no 
less assiduously and no less incessantly employed. From the 
earliest dawn of sensation it is ever busy in arranging, in com- 
bining, and in strengthening the impressions it receives. Won- 
derful as is the formation of the bodily fabric, and difficult as it 
is to collect its history, still more marvellous is the progressive 
construction of the human mind, and still more arduous the 
task of tracing the finer threads which connect the delicate web 
of its ideas, which fix its fleeting perceptions, and which estab- 
lish the vast system of its associations ; and of following the 
long series of gradations by which its affections are expanded, 
purified, and exalted, and the soul prepared for its higher desti- 
nation in a future stage of existence. 
Here, indeed, we perceive a remarkable interruption to that 
regular gradation which we have traced in all other parts of the 
animal series ; for between man and the most sagacious of the 
VOL. X. 4 M 
