George Peabody! that dissembling crocodile William Cowper! that robbing wolf Girard! that thieving fox Charles Sumner! that fawning dog Napoleon Bonaparte! and those most foolish animals Louis Agassiz and Isaac Newton!  It does not well become the weakest links in a chain to boast that they gauge that chain’s strength, for the chain can be greatly strengthened, upon this easy discovery of those weak links, by simply dropping them out of connection.

And now comes the query:  “What is man?” He has always been more or less at a loss for some striking and succinct statement of his peculiar characteristics—­of the mark that separates him from other animals.  Diogenes Laertius says that Plato having defined man to be a two-legged animal without feathers, he (Diogenes) plucked a cock, and, bringing him into the school, said “Here is Plato’s man.”  From this joke there was added to the definition “With broad flat nails.”  Even this definition is just as faulty, as it does not exclude many species of the monkey.  Again it was thought that man was the only being who laughs.  Says Addison, poetically:  “Man is the merriest species of the creation; all above and below him are serious.”  But scientists refuse to accept this distinction as accurate.  “Man is an animal

THAT COOKS HIS VICTUALS,”

says Burke.  “So does the buzzard” (in the sun) say the learned men.  “Man uses tools,” says another.  “So does the beaver—­the ourang-outang hurls stones, and fights with clubs,” say the scientists.  Finally, says Adam Smith, in his “Wealth of Nations:”  “Man is an animal that makes bargains; no other animal does this—­one dog does not change a bone with another.”  We must be satisfied with this, I suppose, but it is a very faulty declaration, for I have seen one dog change a bone with another, in which instance a big dog traded with a little dog, and impressed the little dog with the desirability, under the circumstances, of the smaller of two bones!  And I am not sure but that

ALL BARGAINS, WHETHER HUMAN OR CANINE,

are of that stripe, wherein the superior of two bone or money getters acquaints the inferior with the good points of a bad bargain.  Buffon, at the beginning of his Natural History, is unable, even, to give any line of demarcation between vegetable and animal substances, and perplexes the mind with an infinitude of faulty attempts, in turn showing the weak spot in each.  “For man is a plant,”

SAYS PLUTARCH,

“not fixed in the earth nor immovable, but heavenly, whose head, rising, as it were, from a root upwards, is turned towards heaven.”  “A man ought to carry himself in the world,” says Henry Ward Beecher, continuing and building on Plutarch’s thought, “as an orange-tree would, if it could walk up and down in the garden,—­swinging perfume from every little censer it holds up to the air.”