cause of these effects cannot be annihilated, though it may change. We must pity that flippancy which contemns this high spiritual gift; and pray not only for the unwise who would refuse, but for the rash who despise the glorious distinction. It is a mystery, and the small vessel of our human reason, able to receive it as a gift, is utterly unable to comprehend its nature. "It cometh from afar Not in entire forgetfulness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come We are rudely aroused from our joy in this perpetual benediction of Heaven, and degraded to bestial fellowship. We are as some scion of a noble house suddenly told, "You are not of honourable birth, you lie down with a dog-twist, your laugh is taken from the hyena, your song from the mockingbird, your tears from the crocodile, and your speech from the rudiments of animal cries. You are not a child of God, morally and intellectually endowed, you crawled into existence through many brutal shapes-" "Quum prorepserunt primis animalia terris.” HOR. Sat. i. 3. 99. "When men first crept out of the earth, a dumb and filthy herd, they fought for acorns and lurking places with their nails and fists; and, then, with clubs; and, at last, with arms which taught by experience they had forged. Then they invented names for things, and words to express their thoughts, after which they began to desist from war, and to fortify cities and to enact laws." We will not multiply classical quotations; our concern is rather with those of our own day who state, "men, originally brutes, attained nobleness of mind. Before and during the transition they were not men, but creatures without the spiritual part of our being; nor endowed with the awful attribute of immortality." It may be put more definitely-there was a common point from which the present apes and men were derived. No greater difference exists between a man and a brute, than between one brute and another brute. Some animals are The Animal Theory. 303 very upright, and some men are very hairy. "The soul of a new born infant is, in its manifestations, in no way different from that of the young animal." Negroes and Indians are a low sort of men, but not so low as the Australian and Papuan; all these have not got on, and are left behind the average individuals of our race. Hence the fear of Mephistopheles lest men should be alarmed at finding themselves too much like God, is now changed into the dread of being too much like sheep. The course of transformations, we are gravely assured, was along the vertebral column; indeed we have only to look at the first vertebra of a sheep's neck and the last tail bone to see our identity established, and the gradual transition exemplified; we are all sheep with antelope-like ancestors. The ape struck out a disastrous path, persisting in a brain of small volume; but man selected a high conformation of well-formed and plastic cranium. Young monkeys and calves are still like us, they have not the bony skull and horns which are afterwards developed. One rather likes the humour; clever men are evidently making fun for us. The monkey has been given up, and now we are all sheep of an improved breed. The change is rather too sudden; and if it is hard to see how from the monkey's foot, which has extra muscles, rendering it a foot-hand for climbing and grasping, could have been evolved the flattreading and walking human foot; it is yet harder to have got it from anything which became a sheep's trotter. As to reason, we are told man cannot be widely separated from his lower creatures: for little children do not manifest great intelligence. Human progress is regulated by speech; and dogs talk, and are confessedly more civilised and intelligent than the wolf and stupid jackal. "Who can question that they have raised themselves mentally far above their ancestry?" Who can "doubt that the honey bee, as it gradually attained bodily advantages and peculiarities, developed likewise the higher mental powers, corresponding with the more minute and complex organism of the brain?" Even tame seals come like dogs at the call of their keeper. "As to man's free will, little," we are told, " can be said for "The Doctrine of Descent," Prof. Schmidt. that; the individual mostly acts upon the will of the tribe-I might say of the herd." "The astonishing premeditation with which some few happily organised individuals, of some few species, turn circumstances to account with apparently complete free will," disposes of our conceit as to human freedom. As to conscience, there are some very conscientious dogs; and some animals dream. "That highly interesting dwarf people, the Niam Niam of Central Africa, have no word for God, and therefore, it must be supposed not the idea." As to progress in art, science, agriculture and architecture: the tactual sense, common to every creature, is mother of it all. With regard to languages, they have been developed. When there were races and no nations, man was a speechless animal. All languages have progressed: first the root, then the stem, after that a determinative element. In the root state, articulate sounds grew into words; in the stem stage, the words stuck together, and formed the agglutenated languages; finally the whole stood complete with inflexions in the speech of many nations. We are to conclude that, "from the irrational primordial state, man-like beings gradually became human; while with language, the work of many years, reason made its appearance." Some would complete this sketch of ourselves by imagining a miserable ape, crossed in love, or pining with cold, conceiving in its poor addled pate, “the dread of evil to come:" so he became the father of morality and theology, the very patriarch of the old worthies. "Fortunately for mankind, no actual legislators have ever been quite so foolish as some philosophers."1 "Dieu me garde d'être savant D'une science si profonde. Sont les plus sottes gens du monde." There are three centres around which the Animal-Theory Arguments cluster: i. Man was originally a brute. ii. Human Language was developed from animal cries. iii. The Process of Development was by Civilisation. 1 "The Reign of Law," Duke of Argyle. The Plan of Life. i. Man was originally a Brute. 305 For a long time we counted ourselves of ancient and honourable family; but now, because the beaver builds, architects are beavers; the ladies who sing in our drawing-rooms have been taught by the birds, and their sighing swains are descendants of grotesque creatures anciently crossed in love; probably the Australian and Papuan are the stuff of which future men must be built; even as the present originated from those yet lower. These statements, which shock our best feelings, are so far true that some people have an uneasy feeling that scientific discovery is at war with religious convictions, and is removing primæval inspiration from the circle of facts. A brief, yet sufficiently accurate inquiry as to the whole subject, will probably dissipate that fear. We know from the Divine Narrative, as to the creation of man, of other animals, and of plants, by means of the Earth, that all present life is descended from ancient forms. We also know that all the forms of life, animal and plant, complex or simple, high or low, are a marvellous variation, adaptation and extension of one scheme, plan, or formula of universal comprehension. This fact, obtained by comparison of the whole, is confirmed by particular examination of every individual: nevertheless, anatomy of the embryonic vesicle in higher plants and of ova in animals reveals a difference. The unicellular plants and animals are from small masses of protoplasm, and probably each has a nucleus-extreme simplicity is found only in the lowest forms. The germs proceed from pre-existent living creatures; every germ so alike that the microscope detects little difference; every germ so essentially unlike that one becomes a fungus, another a lizard, another a bird, another a man, no one knowing why; but there is no advance into man through the fungus, lizard, bird, as if human life were a series of Chinese boxes, completely but differently shaped in every feature, shut up one within another; though man's embryo does advance to perfection through invertebrate, reptile, bird, and mammal stages. Seeing that existing men are thus proved to be human offspring, the argument is now to be carried into a region altogether beyond human ken; and forgetting the fact that all U living things proceed from other living things, we are to find whether the ranks of the living may be recruited from the not living. All existing organisms, it is inductively proved, arise from other organisms; but there was a time when life must have begun in an assemblage of unorganised materials. That an organism which is to any extent specialised in structure could arise directly from an union of unorganised elements is ruled out of court. We are to think as if we saw, by chemical experiment, specks of living protoplasm precipitated from a solution containing the not-living ingredients of protoplasm ; and we may regard this initial life as the effect, of which the assignable cause is the chemical affinity exerted between the enormously complex molecules which go to make up the protoplasm. This process helps us to imagine how nature long ago, by Divine appointment, gave to life its beginning; or, speaking more freely, gave beginning to life. Then, we further suppose, that from those specks proceeded the first or unancestral organisms; and that these unancestral organisms did, in some way or other, transmit ancestral peculiarities; so that out of no definite tendency came definite structure exquisitely adapted to function. The origin of protoplasm, thus guessed at, the association of vital properties with protoplasm remains unsolved, and organic construction is still an insoluble mystery. The man of science thus trying to show how life may have originated, contents in some degree the curiosity of the religious man who knows, from Scripture, why life was originated. The supposed initial germ is multiplied and magnified, into the manifold series and gradations of terrestrial existence; and the whole process is exemplified and accomplished in every case of individual progression. To account for the maintenance of life during the infancy of primeval existences; to be rid of the difficulty as to untold millions of organic molecules all rushing together at some appointed instant to form adult organisms; and to show that no new energies have appeared at any period of the earth's history; the doctrine of evolution affirms that the quick progression in the individual was not realised until one, somewhat analogous, had been accomplished in and during the evolution |