Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/516

496 as those of animals, nor by his powers of perception, will, memory, and a certain amount of reason, nor by articulate speech, which he shares with birds and some mammalia, and by which they express ideas comprehended not only by individuals of their own species but often by Man, nor is it by the faculties of the heart, such as love and hatred, which are also shared by quadrupeds and birds, but it is by something completely foreign to the mere animal, and belonging exclusively to Man, that we must establish a separate kingdom for him (p. 21). These'These [sic] distinguishing characters,' he goes on to say, 'are the abstract notion of good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, or the moral faculty, and a belief in a world beyond ours, and in certain mysterious beings, or a Being of a higher nature than ours, whom we ought to fear or revere; in other words, the religious faculty.'—P. 23.

By these two attributes, the moral and the religious, not common to man and the brutes, M. Quatrefages proposes to distinguish the human from the animal kingdom.

But he omits to notice one essential character, which Dr. Sumner, the late Archbishop of Canterbury, brought out in strong relief fifty years ago in his 'Records of Creation.' 'There are writers,' he observes, 'who have taken an extraordinary pleasure in levelling the broad distinction which separates Man from the Brute Creation. Misled to a false conclusion by the infinite variety of Nature's productions, they have described a chain of existence connecting the vegetable with the animal world, and the different orders of animals one with another, so as to rise by an almost imperceptible gradation from the tribe of Simiæ to the lowest of the human race, and from these upwards to the most refined. But if a comparison were to be drawn, it should be taken, not from the upright form, which is by no means confined to mankind, nor even from the vague term reason, which cannot