duct of individual animals of the same species, it is clear that even if we believe that sufficient knowledge of their nature would enable us to predict their conduct, this knowledge is unattainable, for we cannot possibly know all the complicated personal history of any one animal. We must also remember that even if we prove that individual animals acquire, by contact with the external world, nothing but what their nature provides for, this does not show that they are compelled to make of themselves_all that their nature permits, for the effects of experience are often injurious or destructive. There is, unfortunately, no incompatibility between the system of things and unprofitable experience, for it is, to say the least, no harder to corrupt or injure nature by injudicious or pernicious training than it is to make the best of it.

Romanes tells us ("Mental Evolution in Animals," p. 215) of a hen that had reared three successive broods of ducklings in successive years, and then hatched out a brood of nine chickens: "The first day she was let out she disappeared, and after a long search my sister," his informant writes, "found her beside a little stream, which her successive broods of ducklings had been in the habit of frequenting. She had got four of her chickens into the water, which, fortunately, was very shallow at the time. The other five were all standing on its margin, and she was endeavoring by all sorts of coaxing hen-language, and by pushing each chicken in turn with her bill, to get them into the water also."

In the normal course of the history of chicks, the response to the order of nature which experience is said to have called out in this hen, would be rapidly fatal to her posterity; and it would be easy to give other illustrations to show that the changes which are called forth in living things by the influence of the world around them, are beneficial only so far as this external world is, on the average, substantially the same as that to which the actions of their ancestors were adjusted. The snake that swallows hens' eggs, like its ancestors, profits like them; but the snake that swallows a china nest-egg dies from indigestion. I shall try to show that this fact, and others like it, mean that while the changes would not take place without practice or training, their character is due to nature, and not to experience.

It is almost impossible to contemplate the actions of animals

that profit by experience, without attributing them to conscious intelligence, and it is even harder to speak or write of them, without using words which imply that they are altogether such as human actions would be under like conditions, for our words are adapted to human needs; but, hard as it is, we must, so far as possible, distinguish what we actually observe from what we infer from our knowledge of ourselves.

He who considers the relation between mind and matter should try to determine clearly what he knows and does not know about the distribution of mind. Is not the view of the matter to which all should agree, about as follows? I know my mental state and the things I see and feel by the best of all evidence. While I have not this sort of evidence for anything else, doubt that my fellow-men are rational would be regarded as insane; for he who acts as if his fellow-men have no feelings, is justly abhorred by all, unless, indeed, he is held in honor as a military hero. "A close study of the dog," says Agassiz, "might satisfy every one of the similarity of his impulses with those of man, and those impulses are regulated in a manner which discloses psychical faculties in every respect of the same kind as those of man; moreover, he expresses by his voice his emotions and his feelings, with a precision which may be as intelligible to man as the articulate speech of his fellow-men. His memory is so retentive that it frequently baffles that of man. And though all these faculties do not make a philosopher of him, they certainly place him, in that respect, upon a level with a considerable proportion of poor humanity."

"When animals fight with one another, when they associate for a common purpose, when they warn one another in danger, when they come to the rescue of one another, when they display pain or joy, they manifest impulses of the same kind as those which are considered among the moral attributes of man. The range of their passions is even as extensive as that of the human mind, and I am at a loss to distinguish a difference in kind between them, however much they may differ in degree and in the manner in which they are expressed."

"I confess," says Agassiz, "I could not say in what the mental faculties of a child differ from those of a young chimpanzee."

While the evidence does not have that highest degree of value which I find in my own feelings, good common sense seems to demand that the burden of proof fall on those who hold that apes and dogs and elephants are not rational.

"Who," asks Agassiz, "is the investigator, who having once recognized such a similarity between certain faculties of man and those of the higher animals, can feel prepared, in the present stage of our knowledge, to trace the limit where this community of nature ceases?"

As for myself, I try to treat all living things, plants as well as animals, as if they may have some small part of a sensitive life like my own, although I know nothing about the presence or absence of sense in most living things; and am no more prepared to make a negative than a positive statement. While it is nonsense to regard trees and rocks and lakes as endowed with mind, it is nonsense because we know nothing about it, and not because it is untrue; for it is no less nonsense to assert that stones are unconscious than to assert that they are conscious.

a

Morgan says ("Habit and Intelligence," p. 41), "To some chicks I threw cinnabar larvæ, distasteful caterpillars conspicuous by alternating rings of black and golden yellow. They were seized at once, but dropped uninjured; the chicks wiped their bills sign of distaste and seldom touched the caterpillars a second time. The cinnabar larvæ were then removed, and thrown in again towards the close of the day. Some of the chicks tried them once, but they were soon left. The next day the young birds were given brown loopers and green cabbage-moth caterpillars. These were approached with some suspicion, but presently one chick ran off with a looper, and was followed by others, one of which stole and ate it. In a few minutes all the caterpillars were cleared off. Later in the day they were given some more of these edible caterpillars, which they ate freely; and then some cinnabar larvæ. One chick ran, but checked himself, and, without touching the caterpillar, wiped his bill—a memory of the nasty taste being apparently suggested at the sight of the yellow and black caterpillar; another seized one and dropped it at once. A third subsequently approached a cinnabar as it crawled along, gave the danger note, and ran off. Then I threw in more edible

C

caterpillars, which again were eaten freely. The chicks had thus learnt to distinguish by sight between the nice and nasty caterpillars."

"The cinnabar caterpillars are, as I have said, conspicuously marked with alternating yellow and black rings. It would seem that the end of this conspicuousness is to render association in the individual experience of young birds more rapid and more certain; there does not appear to be any congenital and instinctive avoidance of such caterpillars with warning colors. The net result of these observations is that, in the absence of parental guidance, the young birds have to learn for themselves what is good to eat, and what is distasteful, and have no instinctive aversions."

In his discussion of these most instructive observations, the author says, p. 150: "A chick sees for the first time in its life a cinnabar larva, instinctively pecks at it under the influence of the visual stimulus; seizes it, and under the influence of the tastestimulus instinctively shrinks. So far we have instinct and automatism. Presently we throw to it another similar caterpillar. Instinct and automatism alone would lead to a repetition of the previous series of events; seeing, seizing, tasting, and shrinking. The oftener the experiment was performed, the more smoothly would the organic mechanism work, the more definitely would the same sequence be repeated-seeing, seizing, tasting, shrinking. Is this what we actually observe? Not at all. On the second occasion the chick, under the influence of the previous experience. acts differently. Though he sees, he does not seize, but shrinks. without seizing. We believe that there is a revival in memory of the nasty taste. And in this we seem justified, since we may observe that sometimes the chick on such occasions wipes the bill on the ground as he does on experiencing an unpleasant taste, though he has not touched the larvæ. The chick, then, does not continue to act merely from instinct and like an automaton. His behavior is modified in the light of previous experi

ence."

So far as our senses tell us, actions of this sort are, in all respects, like many we observe in our fellow-men, and attribute to consciousness and memory and reason; and as a mistaken belief

that the brutes are conscious can do no harm, while belief that they are unconscious might, if mistaken, bring untold misery upon dumb brutes from brutal men, it seems well that we should continue to describe their actions in subjective language; although nothing is more obvious than that, while we know their actions, we only infer the existence of mental accompaniments. For all any one knows to the contrary young chicks may learn what is good to eat and what is unpleasant, and may readily associate the appearance with the taste, and those who hold that they are unconscious may justly be called upon by Morgan to prove their opinion; but I cannot agree with him that his studies show that they are conscious, for in sober and scientific truth all they show is that the chicks rapidly acquire power to respond to certain optical stimuli by actions which are adjusted to those flavors which in course of nature are associated with certain optical properties.

They who live in the hope that the actions which the chick performs only after what we call experience, will sometime be proved as mechanical as the response of the growing seedling to gravitation, may appeal to the rapid progress which physiologists are making in the localization of the functions of the brain, as evidence that their hope is well founded. They may say that there is good reason to believe that, if the localized and specialized brain-cells which are stimulated through the eyes and the optic nerves by the yellow and black rings of the cinnabar caterpillar, could be stimulated by electricity or in any other way with sufficient delicacy and skill, all the other changes which make up the response would follow mechanically; that the nervous discharge from these cells would be accompanied, as it has been before, by the stimulation of those localized cells which were originally stimulated by the pernicious flavor, and that the nervous discharge from them would inhibit the seizing movements, and that whether the chick is conscious or not, the establishment of the response by experience is no more than might have been expected from our knowledge of the functions of the nervous system.

If we answer that this is as yet unproved, inasmuch as no one is able now, or is at all likely to soon be able, to even demon