That this power is a function of the brain has been fully proved in diseases of that organ, such as aphasia. This may stand among the best evidences that the brain is the principal, if not the sole, organ of mind. But animals of lower grade share with man in varying degree in many of the high attributes. Sudden terror affects man and beast alike; in both the muscles tremble, the breast palpitates, the sphincters are relaxed, and the hair stands up. Memory in some of its ranges in very strong is some animals, espe cially in elephants and dogs. Reasoning power is shown when the monkey breaks an egg softly and picks away the shell cautiously so as to preserve the entire contents. Monkeys also use mechanical defenses, throwing sticks and stones, and nuts from trees, at their enemies; and the wonderful mechanical instinct shown in nest-building by birds and insects must not be forgotten yet man rises above all this, and remains the only creature who is not subject tO natare, but has knowledge and power to control and regulate his actions, and to keep in harmony with nature, not by a change of body but by an advance of mind. The lower instincts which tend mainly to self-preservation arc weaker in man than in many other animals, while philosophy, seeking knowledge for its own sake; morality, manifested in the sense of truth, the right, and virtue; and religion, the belief in, and communion with, some spiritual being above man, are human charac teristics, of which the lower animals show at most but the faintest traces. Yet the tracing of physical and even intellectual continuity between the lower animals and man need not lead the anthropologist to lower the rank of man in the scale of nature.
Modern materialists are content to regard the intellectual fWictions of the brain and the nervous system as all there is to be considered in a psychological comparison of man with lower animals. They hold that man is a machine—wonderfully complex, to be sure, yet only a machine, provided with energy by force from without—which mechani cally performs the acts for which it was constructed, such as eating, moving, feeling, and thinking. But their views are strongly opposed by those who combine spiritualism and materialism in the doctrine of a composite nature in man; animal as to the body, and in some degree as to the mind, or, as some term it, the soul; spiritual as to the soul or, as some prefer to call it, the spirit. Dr. Prichard sustains the time-honored doctrine which refers the mental faculties to the operation of the soul. 3livart, the comparative anatomist, says: " Man, according to the old scholastic definition, is a 'rational animal,' and his animality is distinct in nature from his rationality, though inseparably joined dur ing life in one common personality. Man's animal body must have had source from that of the spiritual soul which informs it, owing to the distinctness of the two orders to which those two existences severally belong." In this view not life only but thought also is a function of the animal system, in which man excels all other animals as to the perfection of organization; but beyond this, man embodies an immaterial and dis tinctively spiritual principle which no lower creature possesses, and which makes the resemblance of the ape to him merely superficial. It is not our business to decide upon these conflicting doctrines, each of which has the support of many names high in science and philosophy.
Concerning the origin of man, opinion is divided between the two great schools of biology—that of creation and that of evolution. The old doctrine of the contempora
neous appearance on earth of all animals was long ago set aside by the researches of geology, and it is admitted that the animal kingdom, past and present, includes a vast series of successive forms, appearing and disappearing in the lapse of ages. Our sub ject requires us to ascertain what formative relation subsists among these species and genera—the last link of the argument reaching to the relation between man and the lower creatures preceding him in time. Agassiz admits that there is a manifest prog ress in the succession of beings, an increasing similarity between the living fauna, and among vertebrates especially an increasing resemblance to man. But among the causes of this succession of types he does not include parental descent: "the link by which they are connected is of a higher and immaterial nature, and their connection is to be sought in the view of the Creator himself," whose ultimate aim, to which all crea tion and progress was made auxiliary, was to introduce man as the crown of his work. This is the " creationist view." But the evolutionist maintains that successive species of animals, though never so diverse in appearance, ,are really connected by parental descent, having become modified in the course of successive generations. Lamarck says " man is co-descendant with other species of some ancient, lower, and extinct form." Darwin's conclusion that man is the descendant from some animal of the simian (monkey) stock is well known, though his qualification that "we must not fall into the error. of supposing that the early progenitor of the whole simian stock, including man, was identical with, or even closely resembled, any existing ape or monkey," is not so widely recog nized. The problem of the origin of man cannot be properly discussed apart from the full problem of the origin of species (see SPEcins). The likeness between man and other animals which both schools try to account for; the explanation of any interval with apparent want of intermediate forms, which seem to the creationists so absolutely a separation between species; the evidence of useless rudimentary organs, such as in man the external shell of the car, and the muscles which enable some men to move their cars (which rudimentary parts the evolutionists hold to be explainable only as relics of an earlier specific condition),--these, which are the chief points in the argument on the origin of man, belong to general biology; The theory of evolution tends towards the supposi tion of ordinary-causes (such as natural selection) producing modification in species: the theory_ of creation has recourse to acts of supernatural intervention. A middle course is suggested by Mivart: that man's body belongs to natural evolution; his soul to super »atural creation. But this compromise, though it seems to be gaining adherents, thus far fails to satisfy either school. There is no question, however, that evolution, as a distinct theory, apart from all supposed connection with materialism, is securing the assent of scientists. We wait to see whether the discovery of intermediate forms will go on till it produce a disbelief in any real separation between neighboring species, and especially whether geology can furnish traces of the hypothetical animal which was man's nearest ancestor, while not yet man.