To this I can only reply that the exclamation would be most just and
would have my own entire sympathy, if it were only relevant. But, it is
not I who seek to base Man's dignity upon his great toe, or insinuate
that we are lost if an Ape has a hippocampus minor. On the contrary, I
have done my best to sweep away this vanity. I have endeavoured to show
that no absolute structural line of demarcation, wider than that between
the animals which immediately succeed us in the scale, can be drawn
between the animal world and ourselves; and I may add the expression of
my belief that the attempt to draw a psychical distinction is equally
futile, and that even the highest faculties of feeling and of intellect
begin to germinate in lower forms of life.* At the same time, no one is
more strongly convinced than I am of the vastness of the gulf between
civilized man and the brutes; or is more certain that whether FROM them
or not, he is assuredly not OF them. No one is less disposed to think
lightly of the present dignity, or despairingly of the future hopes, of
the only consciously intelligent denizen of this world.

([Footnote] * It is so rare a pleasure for me to find Professor Owen's
opinions in entire accordance with my own, that I cannot forbear from
quoting a paragraph which appeared in his Essay "On the Characters,
etc., of the Class Mammalia," in the 'Journal of the Proceedings of the
Linnean Society of London' for 1857, but is unaccountably omitted in the
"Reade Lecture" delivered before the University of Cambridge two years
later, which is otherwise nearly a reprint of the paper in question.
Prof. Owen writes:

"Not being able to appreciate or conceive of the distinction between the
psychical phenomena of a Chimpanzee, and of a Boschisman or of an Aztec,
with arrested brain growth, as being of a nature so essential as to