The Law of Likeness

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I ON NATURAL HISTORY In a broad sense, the antiquity of Man may be said to be contemporaneous with the antiquity of life on the Earth; and in actual fact we know nothing of his ancestral history, more than we know of it in common with that of the whole animal world. But since we are assured by the...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I ON NATURAL HISTORY In a broad sense, the antiquity of Man may be said to be contemporaneous with the antiquity of life on the Earth; and in actual fact we know nothing of his ancestral history, more than we know of it in common with that of the whole animal world. But since we are assured by the later discoveries of science, that the animal Man is of one blood with every animal that lives and that ever did live on the Earth, what has been discovered to us of the ancient history of his brethren we may take to have been also his history; and we may accept as truth, thai his beginning was identical with theirs, and that he evolved, up to a comparatively recent period, in the same order as that in which they evolved, in obedience to the laws which governed their evolution. We may believe that he was once a simple cell, a microscopic mollusk among myriads of like sort in the waters of the ancient sea, a lowly worm inhabiting some primitive mud-bank, a vertebrate, a fish, or frog, or lizard (?), and at long last, a mammal. We cannot surely follow all the change in any particular organism, but we do know that changewas by the way; and we know also that as in early days the human race climbed slowly up the steep of time, so even now does every individual man, within the womb, repeat the history of his unknown progenitors, and from the same beginning in the cell climb all their scale of change up to his birth. But while we can therefore trace in rough outline, and even fill in with some completeness of detail, the evolution of human life up to its mammalian climax, we can nowhere, in that far distance, distinguish the animal Man from the rest, or mark his singular course along the way. Looking back upon the wondrous march of life, the track presents itself to...