ANIMAL INSTINCTS AND INTELLIGENCE.

THE HE instincts and mental peculiarities of the brute creation, notwithstanding their immeasurable inferiority to the mind of man, have hitherto presented very high difficulties in the way of their rational explanation. These difficulties are partly real, having their origin in the nature of the subject, and partly artificial, or contracted through a mistaken manner of viewing it-that is to say, from the disposition, always more or less prevailing, to underrate the amount of intelligence, acquired knowledge, and wisdom from experience, actually belonging to the inferior

animals.

This last-mentioned circumstance has contributed to keep up an ambiguity in the term 'instinct,' or rather to give to it a false meaning, in opposition to the more correct usage. Instinct properly means the native inborn capacities of a creature, as distinguished from the capacities that are acquired, whether from experience, tuition, or otherwise. The name is improperly applied when it is made to include the entire assemblage of powers and faculties possessed by any member of the lower creation-in other words, when it stands for the same designation to animals that Mind is to man. brute, in common with the human, nature, is a mixture of instincts and acquisitions, of native gifts with capacities the offspring of culture.

The

A mistaken fear of submerging the dignity of man should not prevent us from identifying the superior and inferior types of animal existence to the full extent of their agreement. It is by identification and comparison of like things that we derive a large portion of our insight into the obscurities of natural phenomena. The researches of eminent naturalists, brought to a consummation in our own day by Professor Owen, have shewn the exact identity in type of the vertebrate skeleton, and have thereby established a common plan of mechanism in the moving members of the human and animal frame through the whole kingdom of vertebrate animals. It follows as a consequence that the means possessed by this whole class of creatures for working out their ends and plying their various activities must be to a great extent the same; and there must also be a great deal in common in their wants and necessities, and in the mental framework having reference to these. Locomotion, mastication, deglutition, vocal utterance, pursuit, are all determined on an identical plan, with variations in the detail; and to the extent of this identity there is necessarily a mutual sympathy and understanding among the members of the class. We are perfectly justified No. 82.

in conceiving of the feelings engendered in a flying bird, a cantering horse, or by the loiterings of a flock of sheep; our own bodily states can approach sufficiently near to any of these to enable us to form some estimate of the resulting sensations. If we cannot appreciate the exact shades of effect in each animal, nor enter into all the other feelings mingling with these, the case is not essentially different from our position in regard to our fellowbeings. If a sedentary novelist is at liberty to imagine the experience of a fox-hunter or the happiness of a ploughman, so may an ordinary human being venture to sympathise with the dog or the nightingale in their ordinary avocations and pursuits.

But a community of backbone, limb, cranium, and jaw-the unity of the skeleton-is not the only field of identity in the vertebrate series. The organs of sense—the eye, ear, touch, smell, taste, digestion-have a common character throughout, and differ merely in degree and in the mode of setting in the different individuals. Consequently the outer world must impress the sentient organs in very nearly the same way. The picture of the landscape on the retina of a donkey is not radically different from the picture formed on the retina of its master. So the vibrations in the ear arising from the sonorous waves of the air are the same in kind in every vertebrate ear. There must be, moreover, much that is common in the sensations of smell, taste, and digestion; although there is evidently a much greater range of variety and difference in these than in the sensations resulting from sight, hearing, and the movements of the frame. We have, therefore, not only a community of active organs and working mechanism, but an extensive agreement among the sensations produced by the same outward objects on the sentient organs. This agreement enlarges to a still wider limit the basis of sympathy between us and the inferior orders of the vertebrate sub-kingdom.

Anatomists have gone a step farther, and have traced a unity of structure in the mechanism of the brain throughout the same series of animals, and to a certain extent through the whole animal kingdom. The brain can be divided into a number of distinct portions, and it can be seen whether these portions continue the same, or what changes they undergo, in the different species of creatures. The distinction between the brain of man and the brain of one of the higher mammalia lies chiefly in the size and proportions of the parts. There are certain portions of the human cerebrum that are wanting in other animals, but the deficiency is connected chiefly with the great inferiority of development of the organ. In man the cerebrum is distinguished by the number and the depth of the convolutions, indicating a much larger amount of the gray or ganglionic matter in which the force of the brain essentially resides.

No doubt can exist as to the, identity of type or plan in the nervous system as well as in the skeleton and in the organs of sense. But the nervous system is the medium of all the instinctive, emotional, intelligent, and active processes of the animal; in so far as it is similar in two different creatures, these processes are usually found to be similar. The very great superiority of the human brain, and the inexhaustible train of differences between the human and brute minds, ought not to prevent us from comparing the two to the extent of their ascertained agreement. We shall afterwards see that the endowments we possess as members of the

civilised human family obstruct our view of some of the intelligent operations of the animals beneath us; but there ought not in any case to exist an insuperable bar to the comprehension of the less by the greater.

A fourth point of agreement may be seen in the organs and functions of reproduction so intimately allied with the nervous system, and so largely connected with the whole existence of the animal. In the emotions of sexual attachment and parental care, and in the general feeling of tenderness towards fellow-beings, no essential difference can be traced among the different orders of similarly organised creatures.

The agreements so rigorously traced by anatomists between the skeleton with its muscles, the organs of sense, and the nervous system of the vertebrate animals in general, are in exact accordance with the ordinary actings and sympathies of men towards the brute creation. We always presume in the animals about us feelings and necessities, likings and dislikings, akin to our own. We interpret their demeanour and expression exactly as in the case of our fellow-men. We take for granted that an animal is pleased when it imitates any of the human methods of indicating delight. Possibly we may sometimes be wrong in our interpretations of the signs of feeling and emotion in creatures so much removed from us in point of endowment, but nevertheless we cannot avoid applying our own experience to judge of theirs. The tendency to enter into the feelings of other beings on witnessing any expression of feeling on their part is born with us, and manifests itself with the earliest dawn of our perceptions; and we apply one rule to all cases and to all creatures. After being long in the world, we acquire more refined and indirect methods of judging of other people's states of mind, and depart in some degree from the instinctive method of proceeding; but this last method continues to prevail to the end of life. The discoveries in reference to the vertebrate skeleton, and the unity of type in the nervous system throughout the entire animal kingdom, are a justification of our habitual practice in this particular, such as we might not beforehand have been entitled to expect.

That the inferior creatures should have feelings similar to ours (allowing for differences not impossible to be estimated), and that they should have similar modes of acting and of expressing themselves under those feelings, is an inevitable consequence of the anatomical uniformity of plan observed in our organisation and theirs. If a total absence of a common mechanism had existed among the various creatures that usually club together, the current mode of interpreting one another's feelings would have been unsafe. Some creatures might have betaken themselves to groaning when they were happy, and lain down with an air of fatigue when in the height of good spirits, and all understanding of one another would have been completely nonplussed.

It is not to be denied, however, that there are appearances among the inferior races that, instead of being explained by a comparison with the human type, seem to be rendered more puzzling by such a comparison. We allude to the more mysterious of the animal instincts, and to the performance of acts implying a wide reach of intelligence by creatures evidently not possessed of a high order of mind in general. When we speak of the bee as a geometer, of the swallow as a meteorologist, and of the beaver as an architect, we seem to assume that these creatures have

found a royal road to the sciences, and must be possessed of a mode of intelligence that has no parallel in humanity. It is this imitation of our higher mental processes by creatures apparently not capable of such processes according to our method that has constituted the chief difficulty and the standing wonder of animal instinct. There is required a very strict analysis both of human and of brute capacity to obtain if possible some deeper foundations of agreement such as will reconcile these anomalies. We are not at liberty to take for granted the existence of a wholly distinct mechanism of thought and activity in those remarkable individuals of the inferior creation till we have seen the uttermost that can be accomplished by the mechanism common to them and us. Taking our stand upon the universal susceptibilities and modes of action of the animal nature, we are bound to inquire what effects may be produced by the exaltation or depression of one or more of these, or by those changes in degree that nature makes in so great abundance without departing from the sameness or unity of the general type.

We have made special allusion in the foregoing remarks to the researches that have established the rigorous similarity (or 'homology,' as it is called) of the vertebrate skeleton. Between the vertebrate animals and the sub-kingdoms of mollusca, articulata, and radiata, no such scientific law of unity has been traced. Nevertheless, there is apparently a very great amount of similarity, and in all probability the greatest that could exist between forms and modes of life so diverse as theirs. The functions of digestion, circulation, respiration, secretion, and excretion maintain a common form so far as it is admissible in the altered structure of the individual. The instruments of locomotion, the organs of sense, the nervous system, still keep up an analogy in the midst of diversity; indeed, creatures that have to live on the same planet must be analogous in some degree; the permissible variety must depend solely on the variety of that planet's surface and constituents-it being one thing to walk on the solid earth, another to float in the waters, and something quite different to burrow under ground. Now, so far as the general outline of each creature and the manner of its subsistence will allow, we find that a common plan of mechanism is observed; and we therefore can do nothing better than to extend our sympathies and our modes of reasoning to the remoter types of animal life, in so far as we see them actuated with impulses analogous to our own. There is no other point of view that we, as human beings, can take towards the shell-fish, the worm, or the insect, than what we adopt for quadrupeds, birds, or reptiles. Our humanity and our science alike demand this universal recognition of relationship.

In the subsequent detail of the present Paper our arrangement will be as follows:

I. The ANIMAL INSTINCTS, or the inborn capacities belonging to the universal type of the animal nature.

II. ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE, or the indications of intellect, and the means of acquired capacity among the animal tribes.

III. A view of some of the more prominent types of ANIMAL CHA

RACTER.

IV. The remarkable instances of COMBINING or CONSTRUCTIVE POWER exhibited among the lower orders of creatures.

THE ANIMAL INSTINCTS.

In treating of the various susceptibilities and active capacities of the animal frame that are to be considered as native, or growing out of the original constitution of the individual, we must advert first to the class of feelings termed Sensations. These are to be looked upon as the foundation and starting-point, as well as the motives of activity. If by sensations we understand only the impressions and feelings made on the five senses, it will be requisite for us to notice an additional class of animal susceptibilities, as preliminary to the consideration of the instinctive actionsnamely, the class of appetites or impulses to action originating in different parts of the system. Our exposition will, therefore, have to embrace the Sensations, Appetites, and inborn Activities of the Animal nature.*

Animal Senses.

The five senses commonly spoken of as belonging to man and to the higher orders of the brutes, are admitted to be a defective classification of the primary sensibilities of the animal frame. Not only do they omit the extensive class of feelings reflected from the muscular apparatus of the body, but they pass over the important sense of digestion, and of the various other operations of the alimentary canal. The feeling of taste located in the tongue and palate is a mere preliminary to the far more impressive volume of sensation resulting from the processes subsequently taking place upon the food. There are, not including the muscular feelings, at least seven distinct kinds of sensations, having all the commonly recognised characters of such. The superior animals rejoice, along with man, in the possession of seven senses.

It is very important for our present object to recognise distinctly at the outset the full compass of the mechanism entering into each of the senses— a mechanism that could never have been ascertained but for the recent discoveries in nervous anatomy. The supposition formerly entertained respecting sensation, was to the effect that an impression made on the eye or ear was carried into the brain and deposited in a sensorium or storehouse of sensations, whence it emerged afterwards as a recollection or some other species of thought. Such a doctrine is wholly at variance with the structure of the brain, as well as a fatal stumbling-block in the way of all clear knowledge of mental workings. There is no such thing as a cerebral closet or receptacle of imagery; the machinery of the nervous system is formed on a totally different plan-a plan, too, that when once revealed by anatomical investigation, agrees far better with the common experience and observation of mankind than the other hypothesis. Looking at the structure of the nervous system, we find it to consist of an apparatus arranged in a circular form—that is, returning to itself, somewhat after the analogy of a voltaic battery. At one part of the circle we find a ganglion or knot of nervous matter, highly vascular-in other words, abounding with minute

*See Information for the People,' vol. ii. No. 71, where the human mind is treated of in a manner nearly parallel to the exposition of the animal mind in general, given in the present Paper.