A veneer of Greek refinement was spread thinly over the savage animalism of the man.

The animalism at present dominant in man exasperated Gabriel; it was the great stumbling-block to all his generous views of the future, and he explained to his astonished listeners the transformations of natural creatures and of the origin of man, and the wondrous poem of the evolution of nature from the original protoplasm to the infinite varieties of life.

How could a man of to-day be compared to the biped animal of prehistoric times, though bearing visibly the traces of the animalism from which he had lately emerged?

But there is, perhaps, no episode in the novel which brings out what may be called the perversity of Sterne's animalism in a more exasperating way.

Some years before his death Ammanati expressed in public his regret that he had made so many giants and satyrs, feeling that, by exhibiting forms of lust, brutality, and animalism to the gaze of his fellow-countrymen, he had sinned against the higher law revealed by Christianity.