Peculiarities of Man.

In man there is a principle of mental progress not to be found in any other form of life. The wild pigeon and wild rabbit may improve in color and become white or chocolate or beautifully mottled, but the tame pigeon is no wiser than the wild one, nor is the domestic rabbit any more thoughtful or poetic than the one of the thicket and field. The tame pigeon is prettier than the wild one, but it comes no nearer to speech, or reason, or art than its wildest ancestor. And this holds true all through the brute world. Although the common monkey has been a pet of man for several thousands of years, it gives no sign of becoming a painter or a carpenter, and has framed no word of speech, and gives no promise of ever starting a newspaper.

The history of man has not a single line

of resemblance to this phenomenon, for under the least opportunity man rapidly advances, and, while the monkey and the elephant have added nothing to their brain power, man has passed onward to language, and science, and government, and the arts, and is traveling onward to-day even more rapidly than he journeyed thousands of years ago. Man's morrow is always better than his yesterday. The brute world is stationary. Man's life is a forward motion, pointing toward the infinite.

If it be said that there are brutes which can perform some feats as of reason, it must be claimed in reply that man must teach those tricks or actions, whereas no animal taught man. Man teaches the elephant to pile up lumber and the horse to walk backward, but we never see the elephant repay the kindness by teaching man a new art. Man thus steps above the comparison by teaching himself. Man makes his own language, and railways, and engines; he taught himself poetry and astronomy, but no elephant ever taught another elephant

how to pile logs. Not only does man differ from all earthly life in this power of making an advance, but his advance is something amazing. Whoever will attempt. to enumerate the productions of human genius will in a few hours weary of the simple enumeration of names. Pronounce the words poetry, painting, statuary, music, literature, architecture, railway, steamship, telescope, microscope, telegraph, telephone, house, palace, cathedral, watch, clock, organ, piano, bridge, printing-press, and at last the heart rises far above all thoughts of the brute world and asks the question, Are we not dealing with a God? What an infinite mystery is man! Man separates himself from the brute world by his taste for the beautiful. There is no evidence that the animal world has any conception of ornament, or decoration, or of the scenery of nature. You may go with your favorite horse or dog out into the woods or along the bank of a most charming river in June, but neither of these companions of man betrays any appreciation whatever of the scene on the

right hand or the left. To the most intelligent horse or dog the valley of the Yosemite has far less charm than a peck of oats or a piece of cold meat. Take your trained dog to Niagara Falls and place before him that sublime cataract, and also a plate of remnants of the hotel dinner table, and he will instantly leave the awful river to the exclusive use and joy of his master. It is perfectly vain to lead out your admirable elephant into a prairie of ten thousand flowers, for he will trample down flowers exactly as he would trample down weeds, and would far rather see a bundle of dry hay than a hundred acres of the trailing arbutus. The eye of the brute world is purely practical-it is utterly unable to discern beauty. The swallow would as soon build its nest under the eve of a log stable as of a marble temple; and the peacock, in all his notorious vanity, is just as willing to spread his tail in the barnyard of a drunken negro as in the palace yard of a queen, and with a rare democracy of feeling would as soon have the attention of pigs and cows as those of

an assemblage of educated human beings. The turkey has the same pomposity of style as that of the peacock, because neither one has any more sense of the beautiful than is felt by the barnyard itself where the feathers are spread. When one turns away from this brute creation and sees a group of children running to and fro in the fields in spring, plucking the first violets and daisies, or in the woods breaking off branches of the red-bud or the dogwood; when one finds land and sea full of travelers and voyagers making long journeys that they may see the grandeur of the Swiss mountains, or the Rhine, or the Hudson, or the amazing cañons of Colorado, and when one sees how man pours his joy into literature, the thought must come that none of the explanations of animal life will account for the presence of man upon earth. He must be allowed some distinct chapter in the history of existence.

Let us go away from man for a moment to note that the materialistic theory will not explain the world of decoration. The evolution theory might make some