On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals — John Shaqi
On the Relations of Man to the Lower AnimalsHuxley, Thomas Henry
Science
On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Apes; Ethnology; Human beings
Bearing this obvious course of zoological reasoning in mind, let us
endeavour for a moment to disconnect our thinking selves from the mask
of humanity; let us imagine ourselves scientific Saturnians, if you
will, fairly acquainted with such animals as now inhabit the Earth, and
employed in discussing the relations they bear to a new and singular
'erect and featherless biped,' which some enterprising traveller,
overcoming the difficulties of space and gravitation, has brought from
that distant planet for our inspection, well preserved, may be, in a
cask of rum. We should all, at once, agree upon placing him among the
mammalian vertebrates; and his lower jaw, his molars, and his brain,
would leave no room for doubting the systematic position of the new
genus among those mammals, whose young are nourished during gestation by
means of a placenta, or what are called the 'placental mammals.'
Further, the most superficial study would at once convince us that,
among the orders of placental mammals, neither the Whales, nor the
hoofed creatures, nor the Sloths and Ant-eaters, nor the carnivorous
Cats, Dogs, and Bears, still less the Rodent Rats and Rabbits, or the
Insectivorous Moles and Hedgehogs, or the Bats, could claim our 'Homo',
as one of themselves.
There would remain then, but one order for comparison, that of the Apes
(using that word in its broadest sense), and the question for discussion
would narrow itself to this--is Man so different from any of these Apes
that he must form an order by himself? Or does he differ less from them
than they differ from one another, and hence must take his place in the
same order with them?
Being happily free from all real, or imaginary, personal interest in the
results of the inquiry thus set afoot, we should proceed to weigh the
arguments on one side and on the other, with as much judicial calmness
as if the question related to a new Opossum. We should endeavour to
ascertain, without seeking either to magnify or diminish them, all the
characters by which our new Mammal differed from the Apes; and if
we found that these were of less structural value, than those which
distinguish certain members of the Ape order from others universally
admitted to be of the same order, we should undoubtedly place the newly
discovered tellurian genus with them.
I now proceed to detail the facts which seem to me to leave us no choice
but to adopt the last mentioned course.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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