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links the highest brute in essential community with all lower life on the earth: it bespeaks the alliance of man with all higher life in the universe. 88

47. That the inferior brains present a graduated approximation in physical characters to the human brain is certain. Associated with what we may call the highwater mark in this advance is a wondrous display of animal sagacity, as in the dog, the elephant, or the dolphin. The brute wave-brain is harbinger to the human, much in the same way as the highest of the sub-vertebrate types attain to close analogies with the vertebrate, or as the instinct of the bird is a finger-post to the mammal. But the stream is not bridged by the hoisting of signals on the opposite shore. Between mammal and sub-mammal an impassable gulf is fixedthe "kind, life-rend'ring pelican" the only form interposing. The same holds of vertebrates and articulates. Both exhibit a defined axis and a bilateral symmetry, which are either greatly less distinct or wholly wanting in the tribes below. In both there is an orderly concatenation of generally similar, and also similarly differentiated, parts. Head, thorax, abdomen-legs for walking, wings for flight-are as beautifully and incisively marked in insects as in the most highly or

ganized vertebrates.

As outwardly so inwardly. The complex mechanism ministerial to sensation, circulation, nutrition-nerve-system, blood-system, food-system-is distributed lengthwise in the line of the axis in both classes alike. These are neither dubious nor inconspicuous similarities. Yet the differences are of the most absolute kind. The articulate animal is outerskeletoned and tubular: all the organs and tissues are packed promiscuously in a cylindrical shell, hæmal or blood-system uppermost, neural or nerve-system under.

Typical longitudinal section of an Articulate: showing the relative disposition of Blood, Alimentary, and Nerve Systems.

The vertebrate animal is inner-skeletoned and columnar a central pillar, solid though in segments, forms the flexible floor of two opposing archways, strongly contrasted both in regularity and expansion, of which the upper is a scabbard for the nerve, and the lower a basket for the viscera. Thus the relative locations of the blood and nerve systems established in the articulate class are completely transposed. The precious nerve

filament, in the vertebrate, is, like the electric wire, lifted out of harm's way; carefully extricated from the meaner tissues, and cloistered securely in its neural

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Vertebrate Type: Ichthyosaurus: showing Neural and Hæmal Arches.

arcade. The case then stands thus. Notwithstanding striking similarities in certain aspects of the general plan, there is no crossing the chasm between vertebrate and articulate. Despite most interesting adumbrations of maternal instinct in birds, there is no bridging the gap between mammal and sub-mammal. Finally, and in strict consonance with these fencing analogies, there is no physical community, as there is no spiritual communion, between the brains of brutes and the brain of man. The two differ as Organic Perfection must always differ from Organic Defect. Our greatest anatomist, combining in his survey the peculiarity of parts with the peculiarity of proportions, secludes, on strictly anatomical grounds, the human brain as alone archen

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cephalic.' Evidence to the same effect, assuming the brain as the organ and index of intelligence, may be reached by another route. Pleno-cerebral and manco-cerebrals-" by their fruits ye shall know them." Between the power to form abstract ideas, to express them, to compare them, and the total absence of that power, who or what shall describe the interval? Recurring to our simile of the unfinished staircase, b is nearer the top and has a better light than z; but to be at b, as to be at z, is to be alike deprived of the view.

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48. As therefore the first law of Divine election— type of skeleton-parts all possessors of the central column from the sub-vertebrate tribes; as the second law that of mammalian motherhood bars off the breastless vertebrates from the upper group of sucklers; even so this third law-the law of cerebrationerects the pleno-cerebral into the crowning division, of equivalent generality, and like inviolability, with those below. Man, in this view, is the only species of his genus, the only genus of his order, the only order of his class, the only class of his group. 89 He is, as it were, the third of the three steps by which God has stamped on living nature the harmonious image of His own boundless perfection-Power superinduced on mere life,

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Love allying itself with Power, Wisdom at last blending with Power and Love, in the one being made in the image of his Maker. Till man appeared, the naturerevelation, to an intelligent mind set to study it, would have been, in various degrees, maimed and misleading. The cuirassed fish, or the fierce saurian, was a sign of power in the Creator, but of power alone. When the elephant first made his home in the forest, and the whale took possession of the deep, it would, however, have become safe to infer that love dwelt with power in the Divine author of motherhood. But only in presence of the capacities of human thought, and the achievements of human genius, and the attributes of human conscience, would it have been plain that Love and Power were not all the Infinite, but emanations of a Wisdom wonderful, unfathomable, and of purer eyes than to behold iniquity.

49. Viewed in this light, the typical ascensions of nature are transfigured into a progressive revelation of God. The grosser superstitions of history stand out, moreover, in their true colours as an ignorantly partial reading of that revelation, akin to a reading ignorantly premature. A survey of the saurian monsters, for ever hunting down their prey, might suggest a Deity delight

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