Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/440

428 man to the humbler forms of life around him, while on the other hand, if this relation is correctly understood it furnishes one of the principal means by which man can learn to know himself. Accepting, therefore, the conclusions of the masters in zoology, among whom as to the main points, there are no longer any differences of opinion, we must contemplate man simply as the most favored of all the "favored races" that have struggled up from a remote and humble origin. His superiority is due almost exclusively to his extraordinary brain development.

Very few have seriously reflected upon the natural consequences of this one characteristic—a highly developed brain. Without inquiring how it happened that the creature called man was singled out to become the recipient of this extraordinary endowment, we may safely make two fundamental propositions which tend to show that this question is not as important as it seems. The first is that if the developed brain had been awarded to any one of the other animals of nearly the same size of man, that animal would have dominated the earth in much the same way that man does. The other is that a large part of what constitutes the physical superiority of man is directly due to his brain development.

As to the first of these propositions, it is true that man belongs systematically to the highest class of animals, the placental Mammalia. It would have looked somewhat anomalous to the zoologist if he had discovered that the dominant race to which he belonged must be classed below many of the creatures over which he held sway, as would have been the case if the organ of knowing had been conferred, for example, upon some species of large bird or reptile. But in fact something a little less anomalous, but of the same kind actually occurs. The line along which man has descended is not regarded by zoologists as by any means the most highly developed line of the Mammalian class. It is a very short line and leads directly back through the apes and lemurs to the marsupials and monotremes—animals of much lower systematic order, the last named forming a partial transition to birds. Most of the other