short and sfender, but made of hard wood, are shot with great rapidity. They have iron axes, the handles of which are bound with snake-skins, and swords with scabbards of the same material; for defensive armor they employ elephant-hides. They cut their skins when young, so as to produce scars. "Their butchers' shops are filled with human flesh instead of that of oxen or sheep. For they eat the enemies whom they take in battle. They fatten, slay, and devour their slaves, also, unless they think they shall get a good price for them; and, moreover, sometimes for weariness of life or desire for glory (for they think it a great thing and the sign of a generous soul to despise life), or for love of their rulers, offer themselves up for food. this account of the " Anziques," and the unexampled butcher's shop represented in Fig. 11, is a fac-simile of part of their Plate XII. M. Du Chaillu's account of the Fans accords most singularly with what Lopez here narrates of the Auziques. He speaks of their small crossbows and little arrows, of their axes and knives, ingeniously sheathed in snake-skins." They tattoo themselves more than any other tribes I have met with north of the equator. And all the world knows what M. Du Chaillu says of their cannibalism: Presently we passed a wom an who solved all doubt. She bore with her a piece of the thigh of a human body, just as we should go to market and carry thence a roast or steak." M. Du Chaillu's artist cannot generally be accused of any want of courage in embodying the statements of his author, and it is to be regretted that, with so good an excuse, he has not furnished us with a fitting companion to the sketch of th brothers De Brv. II. ON THE RELATIONS OF MAN TO THE LOWER ANIMALS. To many it might appear that there is a greater difference betwee Monkey and Man than between day and night. Yet, on comparing the highest type of Europeans with the Hottentots who live at the Cape of Good Hope, they will. with difficulty, convince themselves that both are of one origin. Or if they would compare a highly polished and cultured Court Lady, with a savage thrown upon his own resources, they could hardly imagine that he and she belong to the same species.- Linnæus, Amanitates Academica Anthropomorphu." THE question of questions for mankind-the problem which underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other-is the ascertainment of the place which Man occupies in nature and of his relations to the universe of things. Whence our race has come; what are the limits of our power over nature, and of nature's power over us; to what goal we are tending; are the problems which present themselves anew and with undiminished interest to every man born into the world. Most of us, shrinking from the difficulties and dangers which beset the seeker after original answers to these riddles, are con tented to ignore them altogether, or to smother the investigating spirit under the feather-bed of respected and respectable tra dition. But, in every age, one or two rest less spirits, blessed with that constructive genius, which can only build on a secure foundation, or .cur ed with the mere spirit of scepticism, are unable to follow in the well worn and comfortable track of their forefathers and contemporaries, and, unmindful of thorns and stumbling-blocks. strike out into paths of their own. The sceptics end in the infidelity which asserts the problem to be insoluble, or in the atheism which denies the existence of any orderly progress and governance of things: the men of genius propound solutions which grow into systems of theology or of philosophy, or veiled in mu sical language which suggests more than it asserts, take the shape of the poetry of an epoch. Each such answer the great question, invariably asserted by the followers of its propounder, if not by himself, to be complete and final, remains in high authority and esteem, it may be for one century, or it may be for twenty; but, as in variably, time proves each reply to have beeu a more approximation to the truth-tolerable chiefly on account of the ignorance of those by whom it was accepted, and wholly intolera ble when tested by the larger knowledge of their successors. least thoughtful of men is conscious of a cer tain shock, due, perhaps, not so much to disgust at the aspect of what looks like an insulting caricature, as to the awakening of a sudden and profound mistrust of time-honored theories and strongly-rooted prejudices regarding his own position in nature, and his relations to the under-world of life; while that which remains a dim suspicion for the unthinking, becomes a vast argument, fraught with the deepest consequences, for all who are acquainted with the recent prog ress of the anatomical and physiological sciences. I now propose briefly to unfold that arguIn a well-worn metaphor, a parallel is ment, and to set forth, in a form intelligible drawn between the life of man and the meta- to those who possess no special acquaintance morphosis of the caterpillar into the butter- with anatomical science, the chief facts upon fly; but the comparison may be more just as which all conclusions respecting the nature well as more novel, if for its former teim we and the extent of the bonds which connect take the mental progress of the race. His- man with the brute world must be based: I tory shows that the human mind, fed by shall then indicate the one immediate conconstant accessions of knowledge, period- clusion which, in my judgment, is justified ically grows too large for its theoretical by those facts, and I shall finally discuss the coverings, and bursts them asunder to ap- bearing of that conclusion upon the hypothpear in new babiliments, as the feeding and eses which have been entertained respectgrowing grub, at intervals, casts its too nar- ing the origin of man. row skin and assumes another, itself but temporary. Truly the imago state of Man seems to be terribly distant, but every moult is a step gained, and of such there have been many. Since the revival of learning, whereby the Western races of Europe were enabled to cnter upon that progress toward true knowledge which was commenced by the philosophers of Greece, but was almost arrested in subsequent long ages of intellectual stagnation, or, at most, gyration, the human larva has been feeding vigorously, and moulting in proportion. A skin of some dimension was cast in the sixteenth century, and another toward the end of the eighteenth, while, within the last fifty years, the extra ordinary growth of every department of physical science has spread among us mental food of so nutritious and stimulating a character that a new ecdysis seems imminent. But this is a process not unusually accompanied by many throes and some sickness and debility, or, it may be, by graver disturbances; so that every good citizen must feel bound to facilitate the process, and even if he have nothing but a scalpel to work withal, to ease the cracking integument to the best of his ability. In this duty lies my excuse for the publication of these essays. For it will be admitted that some knowledge of man's position in the animate world is an indispensable preliminary to the proper understanding of his relations to the universe-and this again resolves itself, in the long run, into an inquiry into the nature and the closeness of the ties which connect him with those singular creat ures whose history has been sketched in the preceding pages. The importance of such an inquiry is indeed intuitively manifest. Brought face to face with these blurred copies of himself, the The facts to which we first ! ect the reader's attention, though ignored by many of the professed instructors of the public mind, are easy of demonstration and are universally agreed to by men of science; while their significance is so great that whoso has duly pondered over them will, I think, find little to startle him in the other revelations of biology. I refer to those facts which have been made known by the study of development. It is a truth of very wide, if not of universal, application, that every living creature commences its existence under a form different from and simpler than that which it eventually attains. The cak is a more complex thing than the little rudimentary plant contained in the acorn; the caterpillar is more complex than the g; the butterfly than the caterpillar; and each of these beings, in passing from its rudimentary to its perfect condition, runs though a series of changes, the sum of which is called its development. In the higher animals these changes are extremely complicated; but within the last half contuy the labos of such men as Von Baer, Kathke, Reichert, Bischof, and Remak, lave almost completely unravelled them, so that the successive stages of development which are exhibited by a dog, for example, are now as well known to the embryologist as are the steps of the metamorphosis of the silkworm moth to the school-boy. It will be useful to consider with attention the nature and the order of the stages of canine development, as an example of the process in the higher animals generally. The dog, like all animals, save the very lowest (and further inquiries may not improbably move the apparent exception), commences its existence as an egg: as a body which is, in every sense, as much an egg as ently insignificant particle of living matter that of a hen, but is devoid of that accumu- becomes animated by a new and mysterious lation of nutritive matter which confers upon activity. The germinal vesicle and spot the bird's egg its exceptional size and do- cease to be discernible (their precise fate mestic utility; and wants the shell, which being one of the yet unsolved problems would not only be useless to an animal incu- embryology), but the yelk becomes circumbated within the body of its parent, but would ferentially indented, as if an invisible knife cut it off from access to the source of that had been drawn round it, and thus appears nutriment which the young creature requires, divided into two hemispheres (Fig. 12, C). but which the minute egg of the mammal By the repetition of this process in vari does not contain within itself. ous planes, these hemispheres become subdiThe dog's egg is, in fact, a little spheroidal videl. so that four segments are produced bag (Fig. 12) formed of a delicate transpa- (D); and these, in like manner, divide and rent membrane called the vitelline membrane, sub livide again, until the whole yelk is conand about To to Toth of an inch in diame- verted into a mass of granules, each of which ter. It contains a mass of viscid nutritive consists of a minute spheroid of yelk-submatter-the" yelk"-within which is inclosed stance, inclosing a central particle, the soa second much more delicate spheroidal bag, called the " germinal vesicle" (a). In this, lastly, lies a more solid rounded body, termed the " germinal snot" (b). The egg, or Ovum," is originally formed within a gland, from which, in due season, FIG. 12.-A. Egg of the Dog, with the vitelling men it becomes detached, and passes into the liv. ing chamber fitted for its protection an maintenance during the protracted process of gestation. Here, when subjected to the required conditions, this minute an appar called "nucleus" (F). Nature, by this process, has attained much the same result as that at which a human artificer arrives by his operations in a brick-field. She takes the rough plastic material of the yelk and breaks it up into well-shaped tolerably even-sized masses-han ly for building up into any part of the living edifice. Next, the mass of organic bricks, or "cells" as they are technically called, thus formed, acquires an orderly arrangement, becoming converted into a hollow spheroid with double walls. Then, upon one side of this spheroid appears a thickening, and, by and by, in the centre of the area of thickening, a straight shallow groove (Fig. 15, A) marks the central line of the edifice which is to be raised, or, in other words, indicates the position of the middle line of the body of the future dog. The substance bounding the groove on each side next rises up into a fold, the rudiment of the side wall of that long Cavity, which will eventually lodge the spinal marrow and the brain; and in the floor of this chamber appears a solid cellular cord, the so-called "notochord." One end of the inclosed cavity dilates to form the head (Fig. 13, B), the other remains narrow, and eventually becomes the tail: the side walls of the body are fashioned out of the downward continuation of the walls of the groove; and from them, by and by, grow out little buds which, by degrees, assume the shape of limbs. Watching the fashioning process stage by stage, one is forcibly reminded of the modeller in clay. Every part, every organ, is at first, as it were, pinched up rudely, and sketched out in the rough; then shaped more accurately, and only, at last. receives the touches which stamp its final character. Thus, at length, the young puppy assumes such a form as is shown in Fig. 13, C. In this condition it has a disproportionately large head, as dissimilar to that of a dog as the bud-like limbs are unlike his legs. The remains of the yelk, which have not yet been applied to the nutrition and growth of the young animal, are contained in a sac attached to the rudimentary intestine, and termed the yelk sac, or umbilical vesicle." Two membranous bags, intended to subserve respectively the protection and nutrition of the young creature, have been developed from the skin and from the under and hinder surface of the body; the former, the socailed amnion," is a sac filled with fluid, which invests the whole body of the embryo, and plays the part of a sort of water-bed for it; the other, termed the "allantois," grows out, loaded with blood-vessels, from the ventrai region, and eventually applying itself to the walls of the cavity, in which the developing organism is contained, enables these vessels to become the channel by which the stream of nutriment, required to supply the wants of the offspring, is furnished to it by the parent. The structure which is developed by the interlacement of the vessels of the offspring with those of the parent and by means of There is not much apparent resemblance between a barn-door fowl and the dog who protects the farm-yard. Nevertheless the student of development finds, not, only that the chick commences its existence as an egg, primarily identical, in all essential respects, with that of the dog, but that the yelk of this egg undergoes division-that the primitive groove arises, and that the contiguous parts of the germ are fashioned, by precisely similar methods, into a young chick, which, at one stage of its existence, is so like the nascent dog that ordinary inspection would hardly distinguish the two. 66 The history of the development of any other vertebrate animal, lizard, snake, frog, or fish, tells the same story. There is always. to begin with, an egg having the same essential structure as that of the dog-the yelk of that egg always undergoes division, or segmentation" as it is often called; the ultimate products of that segmentation constitute the building materials for the body of the young animal; and this is built up round a primitive groove, in the floor of which a notochord is developed. Furthermore, there is a period in which the young of all these animals resemble one another, not merely in outward form, but in all essentials of structure, so closely that the differences between them are inconsiderable, while in their subsequent course they diverge more and more widely from cne another. And it is a general law that, the more closely any animals resemble cne another in adult structure, the longer and the more intimately do their cmbryos resemble one another; so that, for example, the mbryos of a snake and of a lizard remain like cne another longer than do those of a snake and of a bird; and the cmbryo of a dog and of a cat remain like ne another for a far longer period than do those of a dog and a bird; or of a dog and an op possum; or even than those of a dog and a monkey. Thus the study of development affords a clear test of closeness of structural affinity, and one turns with impatience to inquire what results are yielded by the study of the development of man. Is he something apart? Does he originate in a totally different way from deg, bird, ficg, and fish, thus justifying those who assert him to have no place in nature and no real affinity with the lower world of animal life? Or does he originate in a similar geim, rass through the same slow and gradually picgressive modifications -depend on the same contrivances for pro. ection and nutrition, and finally enter the world by the help of the same mechanism? The reply is not doubtful for a moment, and has not been doubtful any time these thirty years. Without question, the mode of origin and the early stages of the development of man are identical with those of the animals immediately below him in the scale; with. out a doubt, in these respects, he is fur nearer the apes than the apes are to the dog. The human ovum is about 1 of an en mode of his nutrition before and after birth, with the animals which lie immediately below him in the scale-man, if his adult and perfect structure be compared with theirs, exhibits, as might be expected, a marvellous likenese of organization. He resembles them as they resemble one another-he differs from them as they differ from one another. And, though these differences and resemblances cannot be weighed and measured, their value may be readily estimated; the scale or standard of judgment, touching that value, being afforded and expressed by the system of classifica tion of animals now current among zoolo gists. fn diameter, and might be described in the same terms as that of the dog, so that I need only refer to the figure illustrative (14 A) of its structure. It leaves the organ in which it is formed in a similar fashion and enters the organic chamber prepared for its reception in the same way, the conditions of its development being in all respects the same. It has not yet been possible (and only by some rare chance can it ever be possible) to study the human ovum in so early a develop mental stage as that of yelk division, but there is every reason to conclude that the changes it undergoes are identical with those exhibited by the ova of other vertebrated animals; for the formative materials of A careful study of the resemblances and which the rudimentary human body is com- differences.presented by animals has, in fact, posed, in the earliest conditions in which it led naturalists to arrange them into groups or has been observed, are the same as those of assemblages, all the members of each group other animals. Some of these earliest stages presenting a certain amount of definable reare figured below, and, as will be seen, they semblance, and the number of points of simiare strictly comparable to the very early larity being smaller as the group is larger states of the dog; the marvellous corre- and vice versa. Thus all creatures which spondence between the two which is kept agree only in presenting the few distinctive up, even for some time, as development ad- marks of animality form the " Kingdom" Anvances, becoming apparent by the simple imalia. The numerous animals which agree comparison of the figures w th others pre- only in possessing the special characters of viously shown. vertebrates form one sub-kingdom' of this Indeed, it is very long before the body of the young human being can be readily discriminated from that of the young puppy; but, at a tolerably early period, the two become distinguishable by the different form of their adjuncts, the yelk sac and the allantois. The former, in the dog, becomes long and spindle-shaped, while in man it remains spherical; the latter, in the dog, attains an extremely large size, and the vascular processes which are developed from it and eventually give rise to the formation of the placenta (taking root, as it were, in the parental organism, so as to draw nourishment therefrom, as the root of a tree extracts it from the soil) are arranged in an encircling zone, while in man the allantois em ins comparatively small, and its vascular rootlets are eventually restricted to one disk-like spot. Hence, while the placenta of the dog is like a girdle, that of man has the cake-like form indicated by the name of the organ. But exactly in those respects in which the developing man differs from the dog, he resembles the ape, which, like man, has a spheroidal yelk-sac and a discoidal-sometimes partially lobed placenta. So that it is only quite in the later stages of development that the young human being presents marked differences from the young ape, while the latter departs as much from the dog in its development as the man does. Startling as the last assertion may appear to be, it is demonstrably true, and it alone appears to me sufficient to place beyond all doubt the structural unity of man with the rest of the animal world, and more particuearly and closely with the apes. Thus, identical in the physical processes by which he originates-identical in the early stages of his forination-identical in the |
