natures. If that Frenchman meant to infer that the modesty of a civilized being: is no better than the semi-bestial instincts of a man-ape, he was as contemptible as the poet could wish, but Le was also grossly illogical. His observation merely went to show by what means one of the most essential of social instincts was originally generated in the world; and it is not the less essential because in its first origin it partook of the grossness of the animal in which it was implanted. Mr. MacLennan has written a very interesting book tending to show that the original marriage ceremony was everywhere like that which survives in Australia to this day, where the wild human being knocks down his beloved with a club, and drags her off to his own den. Suppose this to be true, would it follow that marriage in the most refined and purest societies was no better than forcible abduction as practised in the Australian bush? Surely it would follow no more than the development of a man from a monkey would prove that men still have tails, or that the brain of a Newton is no better than that which directs a chimpanzee in its search for nuts. In short, it is sufficiently plain that we do not diminish the value of any human accomplishments by tracing them back to their remote origin in the brute, or even the insect creation. That shudder which runs through us when we are invited to recognize our poor relations in the Regent's Park is gratuitous. The philosopher may have thrown more light upon the process by which we came to be what we are; but he does not, for he obviously cannot, argue that we are other than we are. Whether in pursuing our genealogy we stop short at "who was the son of Adam," or carry it back through a vast series of links to "who was the son of a monkey," the fact of our present existence, with our present instincts, aspirations, and endowments, remains precisely what it was. The prospect, indeed, is improved for our remote descendants, "far on in summers that we shall not see;" but for us poor creatures living and moving in this nineteenth century after Christ, the circumstances remain unaltered. Turn it as you will, we are the base from which the line is measured, and not the indeterminate point to be discovered by a process of trigonometry.
Is, then, the alarm which has been excited in men's minds totally unreasonable? In one sense it would seem to be so. The speculations of which we have been speaking are absolutely harmless to any one who holds—as surely every sincere believer ought to hold—that religion depends upon certain instincts whose existence cannot be explained away by any possible account of the mode by which they came into existence. Property is not less sacred in the eyes of a reasonable man because it may have originated in mere physical force; nor religion because it first dawned upon mankind in the vague guesses of some torpid brain, which fancied that a bigger Caliban was moving the stars and rolling the thunder. But it may be true that the new theories will transform the mode in which men interpret the universe to themselves,
