Note 32 — II ON THE RELATIONS OF MAN TO THE LOWER ANIMALS.

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, &c., 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 preclude a comparison between them, or as being other than a difference of degree, I cannot shut my eyes to the significance of that all-pervading similitude of structure—every tooth, every bone, strictly homologous—which makes the determination of the difference between Homo and Pithecus the anatomist’s difficulty.”

Surely it is a little singular that the “anatomist,” who finds it “difficult” to “determine the difference” between Homo and Pithecus, should yet range them on anatomical grounds, in distinct sub-classes!