At the present moment you will be kind enough to separate me from them, because it is in no way essential to my present argument that I should advocate their views. Don't suppose that I am saying this for the purpose of escaping the responsibility of their beliefs; indeed, at other times and in other places, I do not think that point has been left doubtful; but I want clearly to point out to you that for my present argument they may all be wrong; and, nevertheless, my argument will hold good. The biologists tell us that all this is an entire mistake. They turn to the physical organisation of man. They examine his whole structure, his bony frame and all that clothes it. They resolve him into the finest particles into which the microscope will enable them to break him up. They consider the performance of his various functions and activities, and they look at the manner in which he occurs on the surface of the world. Then they turn to other animals, and taking the first handy domestic animal--say a dog--they profess to be able to demonstrate that the analysis of the dog leads them, in gross, to precisely the same results as the analysis of the man; that they find almost identically the same bones, having the same relations; that they can name the muscles of the dog by the names of the muscles of the man, and the nerves of the dog by those of the nerves of the man, and that, such structures and organs of sense as we find in the man such also we find in the dog; they analyse the brain and spinal cord, and they find that the nomenclature which fits the one answers for the other. They carry their microscopic inquiries in the case of the dog as far as they can, and they find that his body is resolvable into the same elements as those of the man. Moreover, they trace back the dog's and the man's development, and they find that, at a certain stage of their existence, the two creatures are not distinguishable the one from the other; they find that the dog and his kind have a certain distribution over the surface of the world, comparable in its way to the distribution of the human species. What is true of the dog they tell us is true of all the higher animals; and they assert that they can lay down a common plan for the whole of these creatures, and regard the man and the dog, the horse and the ox as minor modifications of one great fundamental unity. Moreover, the investigations of the last three-quarters of a century have proved, they tell us, that similar inquiries, carried out through all the different kinds of animals which are met with in nature, will lead us, not in one straight series, but by many roads, step by step, gradation by gradation, from man, at the summit, to specks of animated jelly at the bottom of the series. So that the idea of Leibnitz, and of Bonnet, that animals form a great scale of being, in which there are a series of gradations from the most complicated form to the lowest and