The language of animals is still a question full of obscurity, but which may eventually, we believe, become fruitful in new facts.[92]
If Apollonius of Tyana and the ancient philosophers did not understand the language of animals so well as has sometimes been believed, at least they did not do wrong in directing their inquiries towards this matter. We have no doubt but that in carefully studying animals, we shall arrive at a scientific explanation of this well-known truth, recognised by all those who live with them; which is that they can understand us, that they make themselves understood by us, and that they understood one another within certain limits.[93]
For a long time it was believed that intellect and thought belong to man alone, and that he had only organic instinct in common with animals.[94] This opinion tends each day towards a change; we hope that we have proved so much. Something of the same sort will take place, we think, for the best studied language. There, as with intellect, as with organism, we shall doubtless be able to prove a unity which may be regarded by analogy as necessary, offering alone degrees of gradation in reference to organism and intellect. Every living being (we are only speaking here of vertebrate animals) will appear to be composed of the same constituent parts, but unequally developed, and of which some have only been taken by us for dissimilarities or new parts, on account of our own want of sufficiently deep study. As they formerly tried to discover new bones in the heads of fishes, until the time when their relations, connexions, and development were better studied; so unity of composition has been there recognised and proved where it was least suspected.
We cannot do better, in order to sum up our ideas on this subject, than quote a passage from the works of a learned man, who in our days has gone most deeply into the study of organic homology, Professor Richard Owen; it is the last step which has been taken, and indeed the most decisive one, in the momentous question concerning man’s place in nature.
“Not being able to appreciate or conceive of the distinction between the psychical phenomena of a chimpanzee and of a Bosjesman, or of an Aztec with arrested brain-growth, as being of a nature so essential as to preclude a comparison between them, or as being other than a difference of degree, I cannot shut my eyes to the significance of that all-pervading similitude of structure—every tooth, every bone, strictly homologous—which makes the determination of the difference between Homo and Pithecus the anatomist’s difficulty. And therefore, with every respect for the author of the Records of Creation,[95] I follow Linnæus[96] and Cuvier in regarding mankind as a legitimate subject of zoological comparison and classification.[97]” Is not the admission of gradation the means of binding more firmly together the great chain of human beings, a thing quite impossible, which could not exist, or rather, which would only be a caprice,—an artificial method or system,—if the classified beings were only thus classified by creatures of their own description? Does it not confirm, even more strongly, the continuous series in which Aristotle, Leibnitz, Bonnet, Linnæus, and de Blainville have believed? We shall proclaim, then, the law, shaped by M. Flourens, who, however, does not receive it, as we do, without reservation:—
Law.—From animals to man everything is but a chain of uninterrupted gradation; therefore, there is no human kingdom. Then comes this other conclusion,—one and the same method is applicable both to mankind and animals.
CHAPTER III.
THE ORDER OF BIMANA.
The naturalist who has in our time most interested himself in the classification of vertebrata, Prince Charles Bonaparte, gives his own opinion as follows:—“Man may be considered, in one point of view, as constituting one single family; in another, as constituting an entire kingdom.” But he also adds that in this second case, “the characteristics are no longer in harmony with the rest of the system.” In fact, we can hardly at the same time admit both the general principles of classification, as followed at the present day, and also the human kingdom. One out of these two things must fall to the ground. The system of classifying mammalia,—adopted in all its uniformity by the two Geoffroys, the Cuviers, De Blainville, and Owen,—cannot be maintained without involving mankind. If man were a kingdom by himself, this classification would be a false one; for ought we not then, at least, to create a cetaceous kingdom, a bird kingdom, etc.? As for ourselves, the problem has been already solved, and we hesitated to come into collision with this new inconsistency. Harmony is the necessary condition of every really natural system. We cannot arbitrarily give a different value to the same characteristics; and, reciprocally, the divisions of the same order ought necessarily to agree with characteristics of the same value.