NO TRANSITIONAL FORMS.

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sence of Mind, infinite in power, wisdom, and love, and ever acting, is manifest in the whole history of the past."*

Professor Huxley, indeed, believes there is a "physical basis of Life," which underlies all the diversities of vital existence so that a unity of power or faculty, a unity of form, and the unity of substantial composition, pervades the whole living world. But granting that what he calls a "nucleated mass of protoplasm" is the structural unit of the human body, and that the body itself is a mere multiple of such units, still Professor Huxley admits the necessity of a pre-existing living protoplasm in order to the production of life; and for the origin of this he does not pretend to account. Indeed, he admits that we know nothing about the composition of any body whatever, as it is, and that chemical investigation can tell us little or nothing, directly, of the composition of living matter. Hence, of all the known forces and properties in the physical universe before man, we have no evidence that there was in them, singly or combined, a power that could have produced man as a living soul. The conditions of his existence were not the causes of his existence.

If man was produced by evolution from pre-existing organisms, where are the transitional forms? The change from the highest Simian type to the lowest human must have been gradual, and have extended, over a long period. But no traces have been found of a creature intermediate between the ape and man, nor of a Simian tribe so far advanced as to fill up the gap. Professor Carl Vogt,† indeed, maintains that "microcephali and born idiots present as perfect a series from man to ape as may be wished for; and since it is possible that man, by arrest of development, may

*Bibliotheca Sacra, January, 1856.

+ Lectures on Man; and Memoir on Microcephali, or Human-Ape Organisms.

approximate the ape, the formative law must be the same for both; and so we can not deny the possibility that just as man may, by arrest of development, sink down to the ape, so may the ape, by a progressive development, approximate to man." But this by no means follows. Exceptional cases of degradation from the superior to the inferior can not be held to prove a reverse law of progressive development from the inferior to superior. Vogt's reasoning is based entirely upon a few abnormal specimens of suppressed human development; whereas his argument requires that he should produce specimens of advanced Simian development, approximating humanity by slow but evident degrees. In the thousands of years since men and apes have lived side by side, the ape has made no advance toward the form, the habits, or the intelligence of man. Why has there been no lucky instance of a humanized ape, under the favoring conditions of human example, and with the supposed precedent of such a development given in the origin of man? And why has palæontology presented no specimen of the transitional ape, which had at least advanced to the level of idiotic humanity, resembling man in the organs of the body, though deficient in his manifestations of mind?

But while such resemblances as Carl Vogt has traced between abnormal specimens of humanity and the higher Simian types may give plausibility to a theory of development, there are, on the other hand, characteristics of man which so completely individualize him, and separate him from animals, as to neutralize the argument from resemblances.

Rochet has grouped these discriminating characteristics under five principal heads, a brief summary of which must answer my purpose for popularizing the subject.

(1.) Man examined externally as regards form. There

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF MAN.

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is not a single feature in the human face which, examined from an artistic standpoint, does not constitute a character of beauty and nobility foreign to the animal. Man alone has an expressive and intelligent physiognomy. This applies also to the body. The erect stature, the perfection of the hand and of the foot, are characters of the same value. The hand is especially characteristic. Man alone has a true hand; he alone uses this admirable instrument for creating the thousands of industrial and artistic masterpieces.

(2.) The internal, sensitive, or moral man. Man is endowed with a moral sensibility altogether unknown to the rest of organized beings. He loves or believes in things animals have no notion of. He possesses the feeling of the beautiful, the ugly, of wrong and right. He alone is conscious of the morality or immorality of his acts. Man alone has an idea of God, and is attached to him by feeling and intelligence.

Man alone of all animated beings forms a complete family. The animal takes life as it finds it, without any way modifying it. Man, on the contrary, takes life according to his will; for all the regions of the globe form part of his domain; and he can in a thousand ways vary the mode of his existence.

(3.) Man considered as an active being. Even in satisfying the lowest appetites, man differs from animals. He alone prepares his food by cooking it. Man alone provides himself with clothes to protect himself from the elements. When we treat of industry, instruments, and arms, the dif ference is enormous. Man possesses another important character, intelligent speech.

(4.) Man considered as an intelligent being-or the faculties of the human mind. Animals possess a memory; but in them it is a faculty founded only on wants, personal

utility, without any true notion of the objects; while in man, who, by means of language, conveys ideas, the facts. of memory acquire great value. The animal possesses nothing analogous to the free-will of man. The animal entirely wants imagination, which for man is the charm of life, the consolation and the remedy for his evils.

(5.) Man considered as a collective being. The animal constantly loses territory which man gains. The day will arrive when there will be on the surface of the earth only such animals as are useful to man. Animality has no principle of cohesion in its members. Every animal lives only for itself. But men group together and combine their forces, and, although individually weak, they acquire an immense power. Man transmits his works and his conquests to his descendants. The animal perishes, and leaves only his skeleton behind.*

Now, these characters are qualitative, and serve to distinguish Man as a species. They belong to a plane so much higher than animal life that they must have been derived from a source above the laws and conditions of that life; they answer to and verify the place assigned to man by the Mosaic account of his creation; that he was made in the image of God, and invested with dominion " over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." The adaptation of man for this supremacy over Nature is marked by that feature of his physical structure which Professor Dana has happily termed cephalization. "The head of an animal being the seat of power, containing the principal nervous mass, and the various organs of the senses, it is natural that among species rank

* These views of M. Rochet are condensed from the Bulletins of the Paris Anthro-. pological Society, and published in the London Anthropological Review, April, 1869.

MAN DISTINGUISHED BY THE BRAIN.

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should be marked by means of variations in the structure of the head; and not only by variations in structure, but also in the extent to which the rest of the body directly contributes, by its members, to the uses or purposes of the head." Now, in man, the organs of digestion, of locomotion, and the like, are reduced to the minimum of the demands of a rational creature, while "his nervous system stands vertical, with the brain at the summit, and that brain nearly treble the size of the brain of a gorilla." The body in all its parts is placed directly under the domination of the head, and is fitted for head-uses. "The superiority of man to other animals has long been recognized in the structure of his hand, which is so wonderfully fashioued for the service of his exalted nature; in his erectness of form, which seems like a promise of a world above, denied the animal, which goes bowed toward the earth; in his face, which is made not only to exhibit the inferior emotion of pleasure, through the smile or laugh, but—when not debased by sin—to move in quick response to all higher emotions and sentiments, and calls for sympathy, as though it were the outer film of the soul itself; in his speech, which is the soul in fuller action wielding its power in force on other souls. We now per

ceive that these characteristics are outer manifestations of a structure whose elevation for the uses of the brain is in accord with man's greatness of intellect and soul. Thus living Nature, as with universal acclaim, bows before man its visible head. Man, the offspring, not of Nature, but of God, can not be brought within the plane of a material development without destroying all that is distinctive in Humanity." His dominion over Nature will be set forth more at length in a subsequent lecture. But we can not close this train of thought without a grateful recognition of the nobility and grandeur of our Humanity as first conceived in the