The resemblances, homologies, and metamorphoses existing everywhere
among animal forms are, therefore, evidence of the most logical
consanguinities. It is all so perfectly plain. The structures of
organic beings have come about as a result of the action and
reaction of environment upon these structures. Every being—and not
only every being, but every species, the whole organic world—has
come to be what it is as a result of the incessant hammerings of its
surroundings, the hammerings not only of the present, but of the
long-stretching past. By surroundings is meant, of course, the rest
of the universe. Those animals belonging to the same stock resemble
each other because they have been subjected to the same experiences,
the same series of selections. They have lain on the same great
anvil, and felt the down-comings of the same sledge. The
similarities among animal forms in general indicate relationships,
just as the similarities among the races of men indicate racial
consanguinities. All men belong to the human species because they
are all fundamentally alike. But there are differences in the
character of the hair, in the colour of the skin, in the
conformation of the skull, and in the structure of the language,
among the different varieties of the species, indicating striking
variety in relationship and origin. An eminent biologist has said
that if Negroes and Caucasians were snails they would be classed as
entirely distinct species of animals. Whether, as is thought by
some, the woolly-haired races are the descendants of the African
anthropoids, and the straight-haired varieties are the posterity of
the orangs and gibbons, we may never know positively. But we do know
that these two great branches of mankind must have different
genealogies, extending to a remote antiquity, and that the varieties
belonging to each great group sustain to each other the relations of
a common kinship. Englishmen look like each other, act like each
other, and speak the same language. So do Frenchmen and Swedes and
Chinese. Every people is peculiar. This is not the result of
accident or agreement, but the result of law. Mongolians do not all
have short heads, yellow faces, slanting eyes, and prominent malars
because they have agreed to have them, but as a result of a common
pedigree. Similarity of structure implies commonalty of origin, and
commonalty of origin means consanguinity.
And this is true whether you contemplate the featural resemblances
of brothers and sisters of the same human parent, or those more
fundamental characteristics which distinguish species, orders, and
sub-kingdoms. All animals are composed of protoplasm, which is a
compound of clay, because all animals are descended from the same
first parents, protoplasmic organisms evolved out of the elemental
ooze. All vertebrates have nerve-filled backbones with two pairs of
ventrally branching limbs, because the original ancestors of the
vertebrates had nerve-filled backbones with two pairs of ventrally
branching limbs. Insects individually evolve from worms because
worms are their phylogenetic fathers and mothers. Man has hands and
a vertical spine, and walks on his hind-limbs, not because he was
fashioned in the image of a god, but because his ancestors lived
among the trees. The habit of using the posterior limbs for
locomotion, and the anterior for prehension, and the resulting
perpendicular, are peculiarities developed by our simian ancestors
wholly on account of the incentives to such structure and posture
afforded by aboreal life. These peculiarities would not likely have
been acquired by quadrupeds living upon and taking their food from a
perfectly level and treeless plain. If there had been no forests on
the earth, therefore, there would have been no incentive to the
perpendicular, and the ‘human form divine’ would have been
inconceivably different from what it is to-day. And if fishes had
had three serial pairs of limbs instead of two, and their posterity
had inherited them, as they certainly would have had the foresight
to do if they had had the opportunity, the highest animals on the
earth to-day, the ‘paragons of creation,’ would probably be
two-handed quadrupeds (centaurs) instead of two-handed bipeds. And
much more efficient and ideal individuals they would have been in
every way than the rickety, peculiar, unsubstantial plantigrades
who, by their talent to talk, have become the masters of the
universe, and, by their imaginations, ‘divine.’
Kinship is universal. The orders, families, species, and races of
the animal kingdom are the branches of a gigantic arbour. Every
individual is a cell, every species is a tissue, and every order is
an organ in the great surging, suffering, palpitating process. Man
is simply one portion of the immense enterprise. He is as veritably
an animal as the insect that drinks its little fill from his veins,
the ox he goads, or the wild-fox that flees before his bellowings.
Man is not a god, nor in any imminent danger of becoming one. He is
not a celestial star-babe dropped down among mundane matters for a
time and endowed with wing possibilities and the anatomy of a deity.
He is a mammal of the order of primates, not so lamentable when we
think of the hyena and the serpent, but an exceedingly discouraging
vertebrate compared with what he ought to be. He has come up from
the worm and the quadruped. His relatives dwell on the prairies and
in the fields, forests, and waves. He shares the honours and
partakes of the infirmities of all his kindred. He walks on his
hind-limbs like the ape; he eats herbage and suckles his young like
the ox; he slays his fellows and fills himself with their blood like
the crocodile and the tiger; he grows old and dies, and turns to
banqueting worms, like all that come from the elemental loins. He
cannot exceed the winds like the hound, nor dissolve his image in
the mid-day blue like the eagle. He has not the courage of the
gorilla, the magnificence of the steed, nor the plaintive innocence
of the ring-dove. Poor, pitiful, glory-hunting hideful! Born into a
universe which he creates when he comes into it, and clinging, like
all his kindred, to a clod that knows him not, he drives on in the
preposterous storm of the atoms, as helpless to fashion his fate as
the sleet that pelts him, and lost absolutely in the somnambulism of
his own being.