l jury. But what if it is all true? What
if, as some think, our millionth cousin, the tiger or cat, is
anatomically a better mammal than I? His teeth and claws and
magnificent muscles are of small value compared with man's mental
power.

What a comedy that man should work so hard to prove that his chief
glory is his opposable thumb, or a few ounces of brain matter! Man's
glory is his mind and will, his reason and moral powers, his vision
of, and communion with, God. And supposing it be true, as I believe
it is true, that the animal has the germ of these also, does that
cloud my mind or obscure my vision or weaken my action? It bids me
only strive the harder to be worthy of the noble ancestors who have
raised me to my higher level and on whose buried shoulders I stand.
Whatever may have been our origin, whoever our ancestors, we are
men. Then let us play the man. If we will but play our part as well
as our old ancestors played theirs, if we will but walk and act
according to our light one-half as heroically and well as they
groped in the darkness, we need not worry about the future. That
will be assured.

Says Professor Huxley: "Man now stands as on a mountain-top far
above the level of his humble fellows, and transfigured from his
grosser nature by reflecting here and there a ray from the infinite
source of truth. And thoughtful man, once escaped from the blinding
influences of traditional prejudice, will find in the lowly stock
whence man has sprung the best evidence of the splendor of his
capacities, and will discern in his long progress through the past a
reasonable ground of faith in his attainment of a nobler future."

We have sketched hastily and in rude outline the anatomical
structure of the successive stages of man's ancestry; let us now, in
a very brief recapitulation, condense this chronicle into a
historical record of progress.

We began with the amoeba. This could not have been the beginning.
In all its structure it tells us of something earlier and far
simpler, but what this earlier ancestor was we do not know. Rather
more highly organized relatives of the amoeba, the flagellata,
have produced a membrane, and swim by means of vibratile,
whiplash-like flagella. We must emphasize that these little animals
correspond in all essential respects to the cells of our bodies;
they are unicellular animals. And the cell once developed remains
essentially the same structure, modified only in details, throughout