Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/74

64 But Anthropology should descend much lower than the animals when it would enlighten us completely. Vegetables are not animals, any more than animals are man. But men, animals, and vegetables, are all organized and living beings. They are distinguished from minerals, which are neither the one nor the other, by certain general facts common to all.

All organized beings have a limited duration; all are born small and feeble; during part of their existence, all grow and strengthen, then decrease in energy and vitality, sometimes also in size; finally all die. Throughout life, all organized and living beings need nourishment. Before death, all reproduce their kind by a seed or an egg (we speak here of species, not of individuals), and this is true even of those which seem to come directly from a bud, from a layer, from a graft, etc.; for from bud to bud, from layer to layer, from graft to graft, we can rise to the seed and to the egg. Finally, then, all organized and living beings have had a father and a mother.

These grand phenomena, common to all living beings, and consequently to man, imply general laws which control them, and which must therefore govern man as well as the plant.

Science every day confirms this conclusion, which might have been reached by reason alone, but which may now be regarded as a fact of experience. And I believe I need not dwell here, to make you understand the magnificence of this result.

As for me, I find it admirable that man and the lowest insect, that the king of the earth and the lowliest of the mosses, are so linked together that the entire living world forms but one whole where all harmonizes in the closest mutual dependence.

From this community in certain phenomena, from this subjection to certain laws equally common, results a consequence of the highest importance. Whatever questions concerning man you may have to examine, if they touch upon any of these properties, of these phenomena common to all organized and living beings, you must interrogate not only animals, but vegetables also, if you would reach the truth.

When one of these questions is put and answered, to make the answer good, to make it true, you must bring man under all the general laws which rule other organized and living beings.

If the solution tends to make man an exception to general laws, you may affirm that it is bad and false.

But also, when you have resolved the question so as to include man in these great general laws, you may be certain that the solution is good, that it is true, and really scientific.

With these data, and these alone, we will now consider the second question of Anthropology, and here it is:

Are there several species of men, or is there but one, including several races?

To be understood, this question requires some explanation.