inguish
him from the lower animals. Four marked distinctions may be named: his
erect attitude, with the freeing of the fore limbs from use as agents in
locomotion; his employment of natural objects, instead of his bodily
organs, as tools and weapons; his development of vocal language; and his
great mental superiority, with the general use of the mind in his
dealings with nature.

In none of these particulars does man stand quite alone; in all of them
an affinity with the lower animals exists. Steps of progress in these
directions have been made by many animals, though none of them have
gained any considerable advance. In man's strikingly developed social
habit and organization he has no close counterpart among the
vertebrates, but several among the insects. And it is of much interest
to find that in the highest field of man's progress, his employment of
the mind in his dealings with nature, he is chiefly emulated by such
lowly-organized creatures as the ants and the bees.

We do not need to look far among the lower animals for the species which
come nearest to man in structure and which seem to have immediately
preceded him in the line of descent. We find these forms in the monkeys
or apes, and especially in their highest representatives, the anthropoid
apes. These possess in a partial degree all the special characteristics
of man. They are social in habit; some of them are semi-erect in
posture, and their fore limbs partly freed from use in locomotion; they
possess some imperfect means of vocal communication; they employ the
mind to some extent in place of the body; in short, they seem arrested
forms on the road from brute to man, signal-posts on the highway of
evolution. In physical organization their approach to man is singularly
close. In anatomy man and the higher apes are in most respects
counterparts of each other. The principal anatomical distinction has
been considered to be in the foot, which from the opposable character of
the great toe was classed by Cuvier with the hand, the apes being named
Quadrumana, or four-handed, and man Bimana, or two-handed. Fuller
research has shown that this distinction does not exist, the foot of the
ape being found to agree far more closely with the foot than with the
hand of man. Estimated according to use, the hand is, in the whole
order, the special prehensile organ; the foot, however prehensile it
may be, is predominantly a walking organ. And the opposability of the
great