"Le Desert":--Translator's Note.), favoured me one day with his reflections
on the human structure:

"Ve, moun bel ami," he said. "Ve, l'home a lou dintre d'un por et lou
defero d'uno mounino." "See, my dear friend, see: man has the inside of a
pig and the outside of a monkey."

I recommend the painter's aphorism to those who might like to discover
man's origin in the Hog when the Ape has gone out of fashion. According to
David, descent is proved by internal resemblances:

"L'home a lou dintre d'un por."

The inventory of precursory types sees nothing but organic resemblances and
disdains the differences of aptitude. By consulting only the bones, the
vertebrae, the hair, the nervures of the wings, the joints of the antennae,
the imagination may build up any sort of genealogical tree that will fit
with our theories of classification, for, when all is said, the animal, in
its widest generalization, is represented by a digestive tube. With this
common factor, the way lies open to every kind of error. A machine is
judged not by this or that train of wheels, but by the nature of the work
accomplished. The monumental roasting-jack of a waggoners' inn and a
Breguet chronometer both have trains of cogwheels geared in almost a
similar fashion. (Louis Breguet (1803-1883), a famous Parisian watchmaker
and physicist.--Translator's Note.) Are we to class the two mechanisms
together? Shall we forget that the one turns a shoulder of mutton before
the hearth, while the other divides time into seconds?

In the same way, the organic scaffolding is dominated from on high by the
aptitudes of the animal, especially that superior characteristic, the