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 Vertebrate Type: Ichthyosaurus: showing Neural and Hamal 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 * 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. 48. As therefore the first law of Divine electiontype 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 cerebration-erects 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, * Appendix G. 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 ing in blood, till the self-sacrifice of mammalian mothers, and the inner voice that taught man "the quality of mercy" when he opened his ear to the lesson, uprose as witnesses to a benigner faith. The same principle supplies at once the origin and the correction of those worships which were the deifying of brute desire. Superstition, grasping part, creates a discord: religion, waiting for the whole, evolves a harmony. 50. Our immediate concern, however, is less with the manifestation of the Divine essence and attributes in the series of created being, than with the testimony that series bears to Divine purpose and forethought. And this will become still more strikingly apparent if, appealing to criteria as yet untouched, we consider, ever so briefly, the weight that is due, first, to what may be called the Duplication of Ground-plan, and, secondly, to what may be called the Correlation of Superiorities. 51. It is not in the animal kingdom alone that Divine Method is traceable: there is a vegetable hierarchy as well. And if we figure these as twin hemispheres, embracing the whole world of organic nature, past as well as present, it is profoundly significant to find that the trenchant line of demarcation which cuts off the higher from the lower life is drawn on the same prin |