But the geologist is right; and due reflection on his teachings, instead
of diminishing our reverence and our wonder, adds all the force of
intellectual sublimity to the mere aesthetic intuition of the
uninstructed beholder.
And after passion and prejudice have died away, the same result will
attend the teachings of the naturalist respecting that great Alps and
Andes of the living world--Man. Our reverence for the nobility of
manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge that Man is, in substance
and in structure, one with the brutes; for, he alone possesses the
marvellous endowment of intelligible and rational speech, whereby, in
the secular period of his existence, he has slowly accumulated and
organized the experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation
of every individual life in other animals; so that now he stands raised
upon it as on a mountain top, far above the level of his humble
fellows, and transfigured from his grosser nature by reflecting, here
and there, a ray from the infinite source of truth.
'A succinct History of the Controversy respecting the Cerebral Structure
of Man and the Apes'
UP to the year 1857 all anatomists of authority, who had occupied
themselves with the cerebral structure of the Apes--Cuvier, Tiedemann,
Sandifort, Vrolik, Isidore G.
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