day 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 very upright, and some men are very hairy. "The soul of a new-born infant is, in its manifestations, 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. The ape struck out a disastrous path, persisting in a brain of small volume, and a large air-sac in his throat; but man selected a high conformation of well-formed plastic cranium and aborted the sac. 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 flat treading and walking human foot; it is yet harder to have got it from anything which became a sheep's trotter. Moreover, when did man get rid of his throat-sacs and of his intermediate wrist-bone? and when did he obtain the glutei and the muscles of his leg calf?

As to reason, we are told man cannot be widely separated

"The Doctrine of Descent:" Prof. Schmidt.

from the 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, like men, 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 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 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, 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 agglutinated languages; finally the whole stood complete with inflexions in the speech of many

nations.

Those who talk thus 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 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

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no actual legislators have ever been quite so foolish as some philosophers."1

"Dieu me garde d'être savant

D'une science si profonde.

Les plus doctes, le plus souvent,

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.
i. Man was originally a Brute.

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 high races originated from the 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, is removing God from the world, and primeval 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, that man, other animals, fishes, plants, were created of the Earth. We know from science, that all forms of life, animal and plant, complex or simple, high or low, are a marvellous variation, adaptation, and extension of one universal plan. These facts, of Scripture and science, are 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 being found only in the lowest forms. The germs proceed from pre-existent living creatures; every germ so alike

"The Reign of Law," Duke of Argyle.

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. 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. Man's embryo does not advance to perfection through invertebrate stages: so soon as formed it is manifestly vertebrate, and then passes very rapidly through an ordinary mammalian stage to that which is evidently human.

Forgetting the fact that all living things proceed from other living things, 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 a union of unorganised elements is ruled out of court. We are to think as if we saw, by chemical experiments, 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 protoplasm. This process helps us to imagine how Nature long ago, by Divinity of process, gave beginning to life. Then, we further suppose, that from those specks proceeded the first or unancestral organisms; and that these unancestral organisms became ancestors, and 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, leaves the association of vital properties with protoplasm unexplained, and organic construction remains an insoluble mystery.

The man of science, 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 was multiplied and magnified by natural operation into the manifold series and gradations of

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terrestrial existence; and the whole process is exemplified and accomplished in every case of individual human progression.

Hitherto we have travelled on safe ground. The unity of all physical life is a fact. We come now to matters on which men are not agreed. To account for the maintenance of life during the infancy of primeval existences, to be rid of the imagined difficulty as to untold millions of organic molecules 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 perverted doctrine of evolution affirms that quick progression in the individual was not realised until somewhat analogous progression had been accomplished in and during the evolution. of a long series of species, from lower life to the brute, from brute to man. In the brute the process was chiefly by physical changes; but, so soon as sufficient intelligence was acquired to chip a stone into a tool and hurl a weapon, growth of intelligence being of more use than variations in physical structure, intellectual and emotional powers developed with greater comparative rapidity. This, we are told, explains why there is so little difference in general physical structure between man and the gibbon.

Testing such a statement by common experience, we find that the theory of evolution explains many things, but there is no more ground for supposing that man grew out of brute in old time than that he does now. The definite order and progress in creation by which not-living matter became that vital substance with which mysterious power constructed all living things and bound them together; not making porcupine father to pig, nor monkey parent of man, but presenting in every organism an exemplification of similarity in construction with essential variety; confirms the teaching of Scripture"Out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree. ... God made the beast of the earth after his kind . . . and the Lord God formed man out of the dust."

Further, there appears to be no essential advantage in the gratuitous assumption of an infinite series of developments during incalculable time; seeing that a real development is