Man still believes himself the last achievement of the creative power. Darwin, corroborating the Bible, ushered the human couple out of the shades on the sixth day only; and the leading scientists take the same stand--a fact which favours those dubious books in which the questionable concordance of Science and Faith is celebrated. But Darwinism is on the eve of disappearing before preciser notions. To-morrow we shall no longer be obliged to believe that the creator of the universe, having organized the lower species without moral ideas, invented man for the purpose of depositing in his brain a principle which it had got along very well without itself, in the course of its preparatory labours. If man is no longer the latest arrival,--if he is a very old animal in the history of life,--if the flower of the life-tree is not Adam but the Dove,--then the whole metaphysic of morals will collapse. What! after the masterpiece, Man, He (or She, according to which meaningless word may be professed) humbles Himself to make the Bird! What! the stork after Abraham's ancestor! Yet so it is. M. Quinton's labours[1] will no longer permit us to doubt it. It becomes certain that the human intelligence, far from being the goal of creation, is only an accident, and that moral ideas are but parasitic vegetations arising from an excess of nutrition. The phenomena of intelligence, moral consciousness, and all the titles of nobility engrossed on the parchment, might perfectly well, no doubt, have appeared in any other species whatsoever. The birds, whose evolution is as yet incomplete, will not, perhaps, be exempted from them. Their arterial system is superior to man's--simpler and stronger. They can eat without interrupting their breathing. They steal, they speak, they can recite the Rights of Man or the Nicene Creed--supreme achievements of large numbers of men. The bird, chronological king of creation, has remained, till now, and in spite of its improvements, an animal. The bird series does not seem, in point of intelligence, superior to that of the mammals, among which Man figures as an inexplicable exception. Intelligence could then be regarded as an end, only if each of the animal species were rigorously determined and stationary. This is M. Quinton's opinion, at least provisionally. The species, since they are species--since the individuals which compose them are reproduced in beings identical with themselves--the species, such as they are defined, by these very syllables--spec-i-es--may disappear, but they can no longer change. Man has quite certainly passed through various states in which he was not a man; but the day man produced a man, humanity began immutable. It is then possible that human intelligence, instead of being an accident, a derogation, was determined, from the beginning, like the human hand, the human feet, the human hair. It would then have a normal, logical rôle in the universe, and its very excess--genius--would be but exuberance of energy.