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Show 174 .M:ENT AL CONSTITU'l'ION OF ANIMALS. his own discretion in the country and the same per~on when he has been toned down by long exposure to the influences of refined society. On the ac.complishment~ acquired by animals it were superfluou.s to enter at any length: but I 'tnay advert to the dogs of M. Leonard, as remarkable exa1nples of what tht- animal intellect may be trained !:o. When four pieces of card are laid down b~fore them, each having a number pronounced orr.ce In connexion with it, they ·will, after a re-arrangement of the pieces, select any one named by its number. They also play at dominoes, and with so much skill as to triumph over biped opponents, wining if the adversary place a wrong piece, or if they themselves be deficient in a right one. Of extensive combinations of thought we have no reason to believe that any animal is capableand yet most of us must feel the force of Walter Scott's remark, that there was scarcely anything which he would not believe of a dog. There is a curious result of education in certain animals, namely, that habits to which they have been trained in some instances become hereditary. For example, the accomplishment of pointing at game, although a pure result of education, appears in the young pups brought up apart from their parents and kind. The pP.culiar leap of the Irish horse, acquired in the course of traversing a boggy country, is continued in the progeny brought up in England. This hereditariness of specific habits suggests a relation to that form of psychological demonstration usually called instinct; but instinct is only another term for mind, or is mind in a peculiar stage of development; and though the fact were otherwise, it could not affect the postulate, that demonstrations, such as have been enumerated are mainly intellectual dernonstrations not to be distinguished as such from those of hu- · man beings. More than this, the lower animals manifested mental phenomena long before man existed. While as yet there was no brain capable of working out a mathematical problem, the economy of the six-sided figure was exemplified by the instinct of the hee. Ere human musician had whistled or piped, the owl hooted in B flat, the cuckoo had her song of a falling third, and the chirp of the; cricket was in B. The dog and the elephant prefigured the sagacity of the human mind. The love of a human :nother for her babe was anticipated by nearly eYery MENTAL CONS'l'ITU'riON OF ANIMALS. 1'7~ humbler mammal, the carnaria not excepted. The pea. cock strutted, the turkey blustered, and the cock fouO'ht for victory, just as human beings afterwards did, and still do. Our faculty of imitation, on which so much of our amuse1nent depends, was exercised by the mocking· bird; and the whole tribe of monkeys must have walked about the pre-human world, playing off those tricks in which we see the con1icality and n1ischief-making of our character so curiously exaggerated. The unity and simplicity which characterize nature give great antecedent probability to what observation seems about to establish, that, as the brain of the vertebrata generally is just an advanced condition of a particular ganglion in the mollusca and crustacea, so are the brains of the higher and more intelligent mammalia only further developments of the brains of the inferior orders of the same class. Or, to the same purpose, it may be said that each species has certain superior developments, according to its needs, while otlteri are in a rudimental or repressed state. This will more clearly appear after some inquiry has been made into the various powers co1nprehended under the term mind. One of the first and simplest functions of mind is to give consciousness-consciousness of our identity and of our existence. This~ apparently, is independent of the Menses, which are simply media, and, as Locke has shown, the only media through which ideas respecting the - external world reach the brain. The acces~ of such ideas to the brain is the act to which the metaphysicians have given the name nf perception. Gall, however, has , shown, by induction from a vast number of actual cases, that there is a part of the brain devoted to perception, and that even this is subdivided into portions which are ~espectively dedicated to the reception of different sets of Idea~, as those or form_, size, color, weight, objects in their t?tal1 ty, events In then· progress or occurrence, time, muSIC~ I sounds, &c. The system of mind invented by this philosopher-the only one founded upon nature, or which even pretends to or admits of that necessary basis~ hows a portion of the brain acting as a faculty of comic .Ideas, another of imitation, another of wonder one for dis~rimina!ing or observing differences, and a~other in w luch resides the power of tracing effects to causes. There are al:so parts of the brain for the sentimental part / q./ 773 |