Page:Natural History Review (1862).djvu/13

2 the animal kingdom; as one of its classes; as an order of the class Mammalia; as a sub-order; a family; a subfamily; a mere genus of Primates; nay, if we go back to Linnæus, as a species of a genus in which man does not stand alone! The same group therefore has received all imaginable positions in our system of classification—a world apart, according to some; a unit among the myriads of animals, according to others! The measure of human contradictions is full and no room is left for another."

Our author is here, however, more epigrammatic than accurate; for the "tableau des contradictions" was not really completed until an accomplished osteologist—proposing, in 1857, the system whose basis has been discussed and refuted in earlier numbers of this Review—seized upon the one vacant niche and proposed to make of "Homo" a sub-class.

But M. St. Hilaire's remarks upon the establishment of the order Bimana by Blumenbach, and its adoption by Cuvier, apply with redoubled force to this last of all possible innovations:—

"And how could this division stand, repudiated as it was by the anthropologists in the name of the moral and intellectual supremacy of man? and by the zoologists, on the ground of its incompatibility with natural affinities and with the true principles of classification? Separated as a group of ordinal value, placed at the same distance from the ape as the latter from the carnivore, man is at once too near and too distant from the higher mammalia—too near if we take into account those elevated faculties, which, raising man above all other organised beings, accord to him not only the first, but a separate, place, in the creation—too far, if we merely consider the organic affinities which unite him with the quadrumana; with the apes especially, which, in a purely physical point of view, approach man more nearly than they do the Lemurs, and à fortiori than they do the lowest Quadrumana.

"What then is this order of Bimana of Blumenbach and Cuvier? An impracticable compromise between two opposite and irreconcilable systems, between two orders of ideas which are dearly expressed in the language of Natural History by these two words: the human kingdom and the human family. It is one of those would-be via media propositions which, once seen through, satisfy no one, precisely because they are intended to please everybody; half truths, perhaps, but also half falsehoods; for what, in science, is a half truth but an error?

"Let us leave aside then, this order of Bimana—which in spite of the authority of two great masters—has in its turn become obsolete; so that, reporting on the ruins of all the rest there remain but two opposed conclusions, one purely zoological, the other anthropological and philosophical: the human family, that is to say man considered in respect of the facts of his organization and the phenomena of his life; the physical man. first term in the animal progression but almost in contact with the second: the human kingdom, that is to say, man considered in respect of his double nature; man as a whole, crown but not integral part of the animal world, above which he is elevated by his intelligenoe, as the latter is raised by its sensibility above the vegetable world."

Having thus clearly defined his position, M. St. Hilaire proceeds to support it, in the first place, by discussing the distinctive characters of "l'homme physique," and proving that they are such as to justify the separation of man as a distinct family only of the Primates; and, in the second place, by enumerating the characters of "l'homme tout entier," and endeavouring to deduce from them the necessity of the establishment of a "Regnum humanum."

The first argumentation occupies some sixty pages, and is so complete and satisfactory as to be worthy of detailed analysis.