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ORIGIN OF MAN.

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cubic inches, or nearly the average of existing Australian crania. The Engis skull, perhaps the oldest known, and which, according to Sir John Lubbock, there seems no doubt was really contemporary with the mammoth and the cave bear,' is yet, according to Professor Huxley, 'a fair average skull, which might have belonged to a philosopher, or might have contained the thoughtless brains of a savage.' Let us turn now to the brain of animals. "The adult male orang-utan is quite as bulky as a small-sized man, while the gorilla is considerably above the average size of man, as estimated by bulk and weight: yet the former has a brain of only twenty-eight cubic inches; the latter, one of thirty, or, in the largest specimen yet known, of thirty-four and a half cubic inches. We have seen that the average cranial capacity of the lowest savages is probably not less than five-sixths of that of the highest civilized races, while the brain of the anthropoid apes scarcely amounts to one-third of that of man, in both cases taking the average; or the proportions may be more clearly represented by the following figures: anthropoid apes, ten; savages, twenty-six; civilized man, thirty-two." There is no evidence, then, of a gradual rise, by natural law, from the brute to the lowest form of man. Mr. Wallace emphatically urges that savages have a brain capacity not required by their wants, and which could not have been produced by their wants in the struggle of life.

He dwells on some other capacities, which he says

cannot be accounted for by the theory. "The soft, naked, sensitive skin of man, entirely free from that hairy covering which is so universal among other mammalia, cannot be explained on the theory of natural selection. The habits of savages show that they feel the want of this covering, which is most completely absent in man exactly where it is thickest on other animals. We have no reason whatever to believe that it could have been hurtful, or even useless, to primitive man; and, under these circumstances, its complete abolition, shown by its never reverting in mixed breeds, is a demonstration of the agency of some other power than the law of the survival of the fittest, in the development of man. from the lower animals. Other characters show difficulties of a similar kind, though not perhaps in an equal degree. The structure of the human foot and hand seem unnecessarily perfect for the needs of savage man, in whom they are as completely and as humanly developed as in the highest races. The structure of the human larynx, giving the power of speech and of producing musical sounds, and especially its extreme development in the female sex, are shown to be beyond the needs of savages, and from their known habits impossible to have been acquired either by sexual selection or by survival of the fittest." These are difficulties which present themselves to Mr. Wallace as a naturalist. He sees also those which arise from his possession of mental faculties which have no relation to his fellowmen or to his material progress, to his possession of

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consciousness, his power of conceiving eternity and infinity, and the sense of right and wrong which he finds in uncivilized tribes. After quoting Mr. Huxley, who says that" our thoughts are the expression of molecular changes in that matter of life which is the source of our other vital phenomena," Mr. Wallace remarks that he has not been able to find the clew by which Mr. Huxley "passes from those vital phenomena which consist only, in their last analysis, of movements of particles of matter, to those other phenomena which we term thought, sensation, or consciousness."

Science, it is acknowledged, can produce no direct evidence of man being derived from the brute. The argument against the doctrine must be drawn mainly from his possession of qualities not found in the lower animals. As, most obvious of all, we have organs of speech, and, as more important, the power of using them intelligently.* We have the faculty of reaching abstract and general truth, a faculty which the brute creatures do not possess; when they seem to have it, it arises, as can be shown, merely from the association of ideas. Then there is the capacity of distinguishing between good and evil, and that of free will to choose the good and

*"Although it has been at various times stated that certain savage tribes are entirely without language, none of these accounts appear to be well authenticated, and they are a priori extremely improbable. At any rate, even the lowest races of which we have any satisfactory account possess a language, imperfect though it may be, and eked out to a great extent by signs." — Lubbock, Origin of Civilization; VIII.

avoid the evil. Crowning them all, is man's power to rise to a knowledge of God, to the contemplation of his perfections, and to acts of worship. These higher attributes of humanity will fall under our consideration, when we come to look at the mind. Science can say nothing as to how all these qualities came to be superinduced. Were they in the star dust when it was incandescent? or did they appear when it began to cool? If so, in what state? If not so, when and where and how did they come in? Science, physiological or paleontological, can throw no light on this subject, and should not decide or dogmatize when it has no data to proceed on. The Book of Genesis, which has so anticipated geology in the account which it has given of the successive appearance of plants and animals, has here gone beyond science, and given an account against which science has and can have nothing to advance.

That account is brief, simple, general, avoiding minute and circumstantial details: Gen. ii. 7, “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;" a statement implying first the connection of man with the earth, with its dust, its flesh, or animal nature,

and at the same time connecting him with heaven by an inspiration, or breath of the Almighty. Such is the very summary account of the physical creation, of the formation of the dust, the flesh, the bodily frame. Does it say how it was done, by natural or supernatural law, by means or without

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means? Scripture enlarges and dwells only on the higher endowment, the truly human, as distinguished from the animal endowment; as Gen. i. 26, "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness and let him have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him." All this is in accordance with clearly established fact. Man has affinities with the lower animals: this should not be denied. Like them he is formed out of dust and returns to dust. But at the same time he has qualities which assimilate him to God, a power of looking back into the past and anticipating the future, of tracing effects to causes and anticipating effects from causes, of appreciating the fair and the good, and a free choice to act on his conviction. And is there not need of Divine breath to produce all this, to make this dust a living soul? Is there not need of a Divine decree to make his soul like unto God in knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness? In doing all this, God is only carrying out and completing the plan shadowed forth in the geological ages. These two lectures are only an exposition of what the Apostle says: 1 Cor. xv. 46, "Howbeit, that was not first which is spiritual (vevμarizòv), but that which is natural (vizor); and afterward that which is spiritual.”

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And so there appear farther evidences of progression, and of a progressive progression. The

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