he only being who laughs. Says Addison,
poetically: "Man is the merriest species of the creation; all above and
below him are serious." But scientists refuse to accept this distinction
as accurate. "Man is an animal

THAT COOKS HIS VICTUALS,"

says Burke. "So does the buzzard" (in the sun) say the learned men. "Man
uses tools," says another. "So does the beaver--the ourang-outang hurls
stones, and fights with clubs," say the scientists. Finally, says Adam
Smith, in his "Wealth of Nations:" "Man is an animal that makes
bargains; no other animal does this--one dog does not change a bone with
another." We must be satisfied with this, I suppose, but it is a very
faulty declaration, for I have seen one dog change a bone with another,
in which instance a big dog traded with a little dog, and impressed the
little dog with the desirability, under the circumstances, of the
smaller of two bones! And I am not sure but that

ALL BARGAINS, WHETHER HUMAN OR CANINE,

are of that stripe, wherein the superior of two bone or money getters
acquaints the inferior with the good points of a bad bargain. Buffon, at
the beginning of his Natural History, is unable, even, to give any line
of demarcation between vegetable and animal substances, and perplexes
the mind with an infinitude of faulty attempts, in turn showing the weak
spot in each. "For man is a plant,"

SAYS PLUTARCH,

"not fixed in the earth nor immovable, but heavenly, whose head, rising,
as it were, from a root upwards, is turned towards heaven." "A man ought
to carry himself in the world," says Henry Ward Beecher, continuing and
building on Plutarch's thought, "as an orange-tree would, if it could
walk up and down in the garden,--swinging perfume from every little
censer it holds up to the air."

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.

This is the declaration of the great poet Pope, and a glance across the
world's literature will show that the mandate was unneeded. For ages
before the birth of the celebrated "wasp of Twickenham," mankind had
been at study on the subject. "The burden of history" says George
Finlayson, "is what man has been; of law, what he does; of physiology,
what he is; of ethics, what he ought to be; of revelation, what he shall
be." "Man is the product of his own history," says Theodore Parker. "The
discoverer finds nothing so grand or tall as himself, nothing so
valuable to him. The greatest s