Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/493

Rh of the inferior animals? We certainly cannot escape from such a conclusion without abandoning many of the weightiest arguments which have been urged in support of variation and natural selection, considered as the subordinate causes by which new types have been gradually introduced into the earth. Many of the gaps which separate the most nearly allied genera and orders of mammalia are, in a physical point of view, as wide as those which divide man from the mammalia most nearly akin to him, and the extent of his isolation, whether we regard his whole nature or simply his corporeal attributes, must be considered before we can discuss the bearing of transmutation upon his origin and place in the creation.

In order to qualify ourselves to judge of the degree of affinity in physical organisation between Man and the lower animals, we cannot do better than study those systems of classification which have been proposed by the most eminent teachers of natural history. Of these an elaborate and faithful summary has recently been drawn up by the late Isidore Geoffrey St. Hilaire, which the reader will do well to consult.

He begins by passing in review numerous schemes of classification, each of them having some merit, and most of which have been invented with a view of assigning to Man a separate place in the system of Nature, as, for example, by dividing animals into rational and irrational, or the whole organic world into three kingdoms, the human, the animal, and the vegetable,—an arrangement defended on the ground that Man is raised as much by his intelligence above the animals as are these by their sensibility above plants.