Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/513

Rh organs of locomotion from four to two and the development of a hand with grasping powers. But in this physical deviation lies the secret of the whole mental deviation. The species of animals below man are obliged to depend upon their personal organs, being incapable of availing themselves of natural objects. The elephant, with its grasping trunk, and the apes, with their partly freed hands, are nearly the sole exceptions to this rule. Man, on the contrary, by the freeing of his fore limbs from duty in locomotion and the grasping power of his hands, became able to add to his own powers those of nature, to employ weapons and tools fashioned from non-living matter, and thus to initiate a new cycle of evolution that was scarcely touched upon in the world below him.

The employment of tools and weapons separate from those provided by nature in the body is a condition demanding the active exercise of the mental powers, and at once gave man an incitement to the development of the mind which did not exist in the lower animals. We need not pursue this subject farther. The new process of evolution thus begun,—that of the exercise of the faculty of thought in making use of the powers of nature—it went on until it yielded man as he now exists, a being in whom the intellect controls not only his own bodily actions but largely all nature below him.

If now, we may justly conjecture that animals resembling our quadrupeds in general organization appeared on other planets, and if a thinking being analogous to man also appeared on any of these planets, it is very difficult to conceive how he could have arisen in any widely different way. It certainly seems as if the evolution of the higher intelligence in any planet must have depended upon some means of making use of the forces of nature, and the first step towards this, starting from the quadruped, would seem necessarily to be in the direction of the biped, with free arms and grasping hands.

There is thus considerable reason to believe that the beings which answer to man upon any of the planets of the universe must at least approach man somewhat closely in physical configuration. They may differ in minor details of organization, in many cases they may have escaped the special organic weaknesses of man, but it certainly seems as if a human traveler, if he could make a tour of the universe, would find beings whom he could hail as kindred upon a thousand spheres.