What a comedy that man should work so hard to prove that his chief glory is his opposable thumb, or a few ounces of brain matter!  Man’s glory is his mind and will, his reason and moral powers, his vision of, and communion with, God.  And supposing it be true, as I believe it is true, that the animal has the germ of these also, does that cloud my mind or obscure my vision or weaken my action?  It bids me only strive the harder to be worthy of the noble ancestors who have raised me to my higher level and on whose buried shoulders I stand.  Whatever may have been our origin, whoever our ancestors, we are men.  Then let us play the man.  If we will but play our part as well as our old ancestors played theirs, if we will but walk and act according to our light one-half as heroically and well as they groped in the darkness, we need not worry about the future.  That will be assured.

Says Professor Huxley:  “Man now stands 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.  And thoughtful man, once escaped from the blinding influences of traditional prejudice, will find in the lowly stock whence man has sprung the best evidence of the splendor of his capacities, and will discern in his long progress through the past a reasonable ground of faith in his attainment of a nobler future.”

We have sketched hastily and in rude outline the anatomical structure of the successive stages of man’s ancestry; let us now, in a very brief recapitulation, condense this chronicle into a historical record of progress.

We began with the amoeba.  This could not have been the beginning.  In all its structure it tells us of something earlier and far simpler, but what this earlier ancestor was we do not know.  Rather more highly organized relatives of the amoeba, the flagellata, have produced a membrane, and swim by means of vibratile, whiplash-like flagella.  We must emphasize that these little animals correspond in all essential respects to the cells of our bodies; they are unicellular animals.  And the cell once developed remains essentially the same structure, modified only in details, throughout higher animals.  And these unicellular animals have the rudiments of all our functions.  Their protoplasm and functions seem to differ from those of higher animals only in degree, not in kind.  And the more we consider both these facts the more remarkable and suggestive do they become.

Cells with membranes can unite in colonies capable of division of labor and differentiation.  And magosphaera is just such a little spheroidal colony.  But the cells are still all alike, each one performs all functions equally well.  But in volvox division of labor and differentiation of structure have taken place.  Certain cells have become purely reproductive, while the rest gather nutriment for these, but are at the same time sensitive and locomotive, excretory