r animals
seem to be without one. Man, therefore, has far outstripped them in
reasoning faculty as well as in power of expression. This, however,
does not bar the communications which the lower animals make to one
another from possessing all the essential characteristics of
language, and, as a matter of fact, wherever we can follow them we
find such communications effectuated by the aid of arbitrary symbols
covenanted upon by the living beings that wish to communicate, and
persistently associated with certain corresponding feelings, states
of mind, or material objects. Human language is nothing more than
this in principle, however much further the principle has been
carried in our own case than in that of the lower animals.

This being admitted, we should infer that the thought or reason on
which the language of men and animals is alike founded differs as
between men and brutes in degree but not in kind. More than this
cannot be claimed on behalf of the lower animals, even by their most
enthusiastic admirer.

The Deadlock in Darwinism: Part I {245}

It will be readily admitted that of all living writers Mr. Alfred
Russel Wallace is the one the peculiar turn of whose mind best fits
him to write on the subject of natural selection, or the
accumulation of fortunate but accidental variations through descent
and the struggle for existence. His mind in all its more essential
characteristics closely resembles that of the late Mr. Charles
Darwin himself, and it is no doubt due to this fact that he and Mr.
Darwin elaborated their famous theory at the same time, and
independently of one another. I shall have occasion in the course
of the following article to show how misled and misleading both
these distinguished men have been, in spite of their unquestionable
familiarity with the whole range of animal and vegetable phenomena.
I believe it will be more respectful to both of them to do this in
the most outspoken way. I believe their work to have been as
mischievous as it has been valuable, and as valuable as it has been
mischievous; and higher, whether praise or blame, I know not how to
give. Nevertheless I would in the outset, and with the utmost
sincerity, admit concerning Messrs. Wallace and Darwin that neither
can be held as the more profound and conscientious thinker; neither
can be put forward as the more ready to acknowledge obligation to
the great writers on evolution who had preceded him, or to plac