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gerous heresy, by showing that the possession of Articulate 
Language establishes a difference between man and animals, a 
difference not of degree only, but of kind. 
I wish here to make a brief comment upon a most able notice of 
the “ Descent of Man,” which appeared in the British Quarterly 
Review for October, 1871. Agreeing as I do with the general 
tenor of the writer’s remarks, I most entirely differ from him in 
one essential point. After disputing the truth of Mr. Darwin’s 
assumed similarity between the minute structure of man and 
animals, he goes on to say, “ If it could be shown that in their 
minute anatomy the tissues of an ape so closely resembled those 
of a dog on the one hand, and of a man on the other, as that 
they could not be distinguished by the microscope, the fact 
would be of the highest importance, and would add enormously 
to the evidence already adduced by Mr. Darwin.” I cannot 
agree with the inference here drawn by the able reviewer, who 
seems to imply that Mr. Darwin’s theory is unassailable if he 
can prove his assertion as to the close similarity in the minute 
structure of man and animals. I am ready to admit this simi- 
larity ; I will even strengthen Mr. Darwin’s position by remark- 
ing that we are unable by means of the microscope to distinguish 
human blood from that of other mammals ; and further, that 
there is a remarkable correspondence in the vital properties of 
the blood of man and animals, as shown by the fact that in the 
case of apparent death in man from loss of blood, resuscitation 
has taken place in consequence of the transfusion into the sys- 
tem of the blood of an animal, as the sheep, or the calf. It is 
idle to attempt to shirk the import of these physiological results. 
I admit the force of them. But supposing it is proved to a mathe- 
matical demonstration that man is like an ape, bone for bone, 
muscle for muscle, nerve for nerve, what then? What does 
this prove, if it can be shown that man possesses a distinctive 
attribute , of which not a trace can be found in the ape, an 
attribute of such a nature as to create an immeasurable gulf 
between the two ? This attribute I assert to be the faculty of 
Articulate Language, which I maintain to be a difference, not 
only of degree } but of kind. 
I now propose very briefly to explain what I understand by 
the term faculty of language. I shall then inquire how far 
this faculty is shared by animals, and having shown that they 
do not possess it even in an elementary form, I shall then glance 
at the much-disputed question of the seat of language — the 
localization of the faculty of speech, — as I need not say, if it could 
be shown that language had a habitat in any particular part 
of the brain, the Darwinian could plead the structural analogy 
