Thomas Henry Huxley

so that now he stands raised upon it 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.

he has slowly accumulated and organized

Our reverence for the nobility of manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge, that Man, is in substance and in structure, one with the brutes; for

the geologist is right; and due reflection on his teachings, instead of diminishing our reverence and our wonder, adds all the force of intellectual sublimity, to the mere aesthetic intuition of the uninstructed beholder.

even the highest faculties of feeling and of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of life.

can be drawn between the animal world and ourselves

no absolute structural line of demarcation

I can see no excuse for doubting that all are co-ordinated terms of Nature's great progression, from the formless to the formed—from the inorganic to the organic—from blind force to conscious intellect and will.

Lamarck, sagacious as many of his views were, mingled them with so much that was crude and even absurd, as to neutralize the benefit which his originality might have effected had he been a more sober and cautious thinker...

There is but one hypothesis regarding the origin of species of animals in general which has any scientific existence—that propounded by Mr. Darwin.

If Man be separated by no greater structural barrier from the brutes than they are from one another—then it seems to follow that if any process of physical causation can be discovered by which the genera and families of ordinary animals …

So far as cerebral structure goes... it is clear that Man differs less from the Chimpanzee or the Orang, than these do even from the Monkeys, and that the difference between the brains of the Chimpanzee and of Man is almost insignificant, …

As if to demonstrate, by a striking example, the impossibility of erecting any cerebral barrier between man and the apes, Nature has provided us, in the latter animals, with an almost complete series of gradations from brains little higher …

Regarded anatomically, the resemblances between the foot of Man and the foot of the Gorilla are far more striking and important than the differences. ...be the differences between the hand and foot of Man and those of the Gorilla what they …

Whatever part of the animal fabric—whatever series of muscles, whatever viscera might be selected for comparison—the result would be the same—the lower Apes and the Gorilla would differ more than the Gorilla and the Man.

Even in the important matter of cranial capacity, Men differ more widely from one another than they do from the Apes; while the lowest Apes differ as much, in proportion, from the highest, as the latter does from Man.

Whether we take these characters then, or such minor ones as those which are derivable from the proportional length of the spines in the cervical vertebrae, and the like, there is no doubt whatsoever as to the marked difference between Man …

These examples... show that, in whatever proportion of its limbs the Gorilla differs from Man, the other Apes depart still more widely from the Gorilla and that, consequently, such differences of proportion can have no ordinal value.

Is Man so different from any of these Apes that he must form an order by himself? Or does he differ less from them than they differ from one another, and hence must take his place in the same order with them?

vertebrate animal, Lizard, Snake, Frog, or Fish, tells the same story.

The history of the development of any

Within the last half century, the labours of such men as Von Baer, Rathke, Reichert, Bischof, and Remak, have almost completely unravelled... the successive stages of development which... are now as well known to the embryologist as are …

Every living creature commences its existence under a form different from, and simpler than, that which it eventually attains.

upon the hypotheses which have been entertained respecting the Origin of Man.