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 creatures whose history* has been
sketched in the preceding pages.
[footnote] * It will be understood that, in the preceding
Essay, I have selected for notice from the vast mass of
papers which have been written upon the man-like Apes, only
those which seem to me to be of special moment.
The importance of such an inquiry is indeed intuitively manifest
Brought face to face with these blurred copies of himself, the least
thoughtful of men is conscious of a certain 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-honoured 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 progress of the anatomical and physiological
sciences.
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