Nearly all these (higher intellectual and moral) faculties appear in a rudimentary state in animals.... Still there is this wide distinction that even in the highest animals these faculties remain rudimentary and seem incapable of progress, while even in the lowest races of man they have reached a much higher level [75] and seem capable of almost unlimited development. [76] Why does he not seek out the reason of this, or is he satisfied with the _words_ "arrested development"? If I find a child who can repeat a poem of Tennyson's, am I to be puzzled because it cannot originate one as good, or go on even to something better? Am I to ascribe to it a rudimentary but arrested poetic faculty? Surely the same poem proceeding from the lips of the poet and of the child he has taught, are essentially different effects, though outwardly the same. If there were a true living germ, it would most certainly develope. If the savage developes through contact with the civilized man after centuries of degradation, why have not domesticated dogs, who are, according to Laing, their intellectual and moral equals, developed long ago? However, as "evolution has become the axiom of science and is admitted by every one who has the slightest pretensions to be considered a competent authority," [77] it is preposterous to suppose man an exception, whatever be the difficulties. [78] And so Mr. Laing, assuming axiomatically that man and the ape have a common ancestor, is interested to make the differences between them deeply marked, and that, as far back as he can, for thereby "Human Origins" are pushed back by hundreds of thousands of years. If miocene man is as distinct from the ape as recent man, the inference is that we are then as far from the source as ever. Hence it is to geology he looks for the strongest basis of his position. One thought till lately that geology was a tentative science, hardly credited with the name of science, but Mr. Laing wisely and boldly classes it among the "exact sciences," whose subject-matter is "flint instruments, incised bones, and a few rare specimens of human skulls and skeletons, the meaning of which has to be deciphered by skilled experts." [79] "The conclusions of geology," up to the Silurian period, "are approximate facts, not theories." [80]