Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/278

the great majority of animals have had a past history—that they occurred in epochs of the world's history far removed from the present. And when we have acquired all that knowledge which we may enumerate under the heads of anatomy, physiology and distribution, there remains still the problem of problems to the zoologist, which is the study of the causes of those phenomena, in order that we may know how they came about. All these different forms of knowledge and inquiry are legitimate subjects for science, there being no subject which is an illegitimate subject for scientific inquiry, except such as involves a contradiction in terms, or is itself absurd. Indeed, I don't know that I ought to go quite so far as this at present, for undoubtedly there are many benighted persons who have been in the habit of calling by no less hard names conceptions which the president of this meeting tells us must be regarded with much respect. If we have four dimensions of space we may have forty dimensions, and that would be a long way beyond that which is conceivable by ordinary powers of imagination. I should, therefore, not like to draw too closely the limits as to what may be contradiction to the best-established principles. Now, let us turn to a proposition which no one can possibly deny—namely, that there is a distinct sense in which man is an animal. There is not the smallest doubt of that proposition. If anybody entertains a misgiving on that point he has simply to walk through the museum close by, in order to see that man has a structure and a framework which may be compared, point for point and bone for bone, with those of the lower animals. There is not the smallest doubt, moreover, that, as to the manner of his becoming, man is developed, step by step, in exactly the same way as they are. There is not the smallest doubt that his activities—not only his mere bodily functions, but his other functions—are just as much the subjects of scientific study as are those of ants and bees. What we call the phenomena of intelligence, for example (as to what else there may be in them, the anthropologist makes no assertion)—are phenomena following a definite causal order just as capable of scientific examination, and of being reduced to definite law, as are all those phenomena which we call physical. Just as ants form a polity and a social state, and just as these are the proper and legitimate study of the zoologist, so far as he deals with ants, so do men organize themselves into a social state. And though the province of politics is of course outside that of anthropology, yet the consideration of a man, so far as his instincts lead him to construct a social economy, is a legitimate and proper part of anthropology, precisely in the same way as the study of the social state of ants is a legitimate object of zoology. So with regard to other and more subtle phenomena. It has often been disputed whether in animals there is any trace of the religious sentiment. That is a legitimate subject of dispute and of