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COMPARISON OF MENTAL POWERS.

found among the lower animals.

He

argues that man and the higher animals, especially the primates, have the same senses, intuitions, and sensations; similar passions, affections, and emotions; that they feel wonder and curiosity; that they possess the same faculties of imitation, attention, memory, love, imagination, and even reason, though in different degrees. Having admitted that this difference is enormous—even if we compare the mind of one of the lowest savages, who has no words to express any number higher than four, and who uses no abstract terms for the commonest objects or affections, with that of the most highly organised ape-he insists, nevertheless, that the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind.

MR. DARWIN'S MAIN CONCLUSION.

79

The main conclusion arrived at by Mr. Darwin is, that man is descended from some lowly-organised form, and that "with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers-Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.”*

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

*"Descent of Man," Vol. II., P. 405.

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MINUTE STRUCTURE OF MAN AND ANIMALS.

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 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 similarity; I will even strengthen Mr. Darwin's position by

DR. J. C. RICHARDSON ON BLOOD-STAINS,

81

admitting 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 system of the blood of an animal, as the sheep or the calf.* It is

*This analogy, however, in the vital properties of the blood must not be supposed to imply identity in the chemical composition. On the contrary, the microscope and chemical analysis have shown not only that the blood of man differs from that of the lower animals, but that the blood of each species of animal differs from that of every other species. It is stated even in our modern treatises on Medical Jurisprudence, that the microscope can merely determine whether blood is derived from the class Mammalia, or from a bird, fish, or reptile; but an American writer, Dr. J. C. Richardson, in an able and elaborate forensic essay on the diagnosis of blood-stains, has recently shown that the red blooddiscs of animals with rounded corpuscles, are just as distinct in different animals as are different kinds of shot, and that we are now able, by the aid of high

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BRAIN OF MAN COMPARED WITH THAT

idle to attempt to shirk the import of these physiological results. I admit the force of them. I do not deny that man is an animal, and that he has the essential properties of a highly organised one; he is constructed on the same general type or model as other mammals. All vertebrate animals have many characteristics in common, chemical composition, cellular structure, laws of reproduction, growth, decay, and death; and the resemblance may even be extended to the Brain, where

powers of the microscope, and under favourable circumstances, to positively distinguish stains produced by human blood from those caused by the blood of various other animals, and this even after the lapse of five years from the date of their primary production! The facts upon which these statements are founded are fully discussed in the British Quarterly for October, 1871, and in the American Journal of Medical Sciences for July, 1874, to which periodicals I would refer the reader for much valuable information upon this important subject.