While I am telling tales on old Brindle, let me mention another point. Most farmers and country people think that the "giving down" or "holding up" of the milk by the cow is a voluntary act. In fact, they fancy that the udder is a vessel filled with milk, and that the cow releases it or withholds it just as she chooses. But the udder is a manufactory; it is filled with blood, from which the milk is manufactured while you milk. This process is controlled by the cow's nervous system. When she is excited or in any way disturbed, as by a stranger, or by the taking away of her calf, or any other cause, the process is arrested and the milk will not flow. The nervous energy goes elsewhere. The whole process is as involuntary as is digestion in man, and is disturbed or arrested in about the same way.

Why should we not credit the child with reason when it is learning to walk, and with a knowledge of the law of gravity? See how carefully it poises itself on the feet and adjusts itself to the pull of the invisible force. It is a natural philosopher from the cradle, and knows all about the necessity of keeping the centre of gravity within the base if it would avoid a fall! But there is probably less calculation in all this than there appears to be, since Huxley tells us that a frog with most of its brain removed will keep its position on the top of the hand while you slowly turn it over. It, too, feels the pull of gravity and knows all about the impor

tance of keeping the centre within the base. Throw this brainless frog into the water, and it swims as well as ever it did. Dan Beard, in his delightful "Animal Book,” says that a rattlesnake which had just had its head cut off, coiled and struck him with the bloody stump when he touched it as promptly as it would have done with its head on. So it is doubtless true that all creatures do many reasonable and natural things without possessing the faculty of reason. Much of our own conduct in life is the result of this same unconscious, unreasoning obedience to natural forces or innate tendencies.

The English psychologist Hobhouse gives an account, in his work on "Mind and Evolution," of the experiments he tried with cats, dogs, monkeys, an otter, and an elephant, to test their intelligence. Their food was placed in boxes or jars, or tied to a string, in such ways that to get at it the animal had to do certain definite concrete things that it could not have been called upon to do in the ordinary course of its natural life, such as pulling strings, working levers, drawing bolts, lifting latches, opening drawers, upsetting jugs, always stimulated by the prospect of food. After many trials at the various tricks, a little gleam of intelligence seemed to pass through their minds. It was as if a man without power to move should finally feebly lift a hand or shake his head. The elephant was taught to pull a bolt and open the lid

of a box only by her keeper taking her trunk in his hand and guiding it through each movement, stage by stage. She learned to pull the bolt on the seventh trial, but could not learn the three movements of drawing bolt, opening lid, and holding it open, till the fortieth trial, on the third day. Sometimes she tried to lift the lid before she drew the bolt, sometimes she pushed the bolt the wrong way. Another elephant learned to draw the bolt on the fourth trial. The otter learned to draw the bolt after seeing it drawn twelve times. Jack, the dog, learned to do the trick in his pawing, blundering way after many trials. A bolt furnished with a knob so that it could not be drawn all the way out worried all the animals a good deal. The dog had ninety lessons, and yet did not clearly understand the trick. The monkeys and the chimpanzee learned the different tricks more readily than the other animals, but there "appeared to be no essential difference in capacity to learn between the dogs, the elephants, the cats, and others." None of the animals seemed to appreciate the point of the trick, the dependence of one thing upon another, or the why of any particular movement. Poor things! their strenuous intellectual efforts in drawing a bolt or working a lever used to tire them very much. Sometimes, under the tutelage of their trainers, they would seem to show a gleam of real intelligence, as when you fan a dull ember till it glows a little. The

next hour or the next day the ember had lost its glow and had to be fanned again. Yet they all did improve in doing their little "stunts," but how much was awakened intelligence, and how much mere force of habit, one could not be quite

sure.

Hobhouse is no doubt right when he says that intelligence arises within the sphere of instinct, and that the former often modifies the action of the latter. The extent to which the lower animals profit by experience is a measure of their intelligence. If they hit upon new and improved ways spontaneously, or adapt new means to an end, they show a measure of intelligence. I once stopped up the entrance to a black hornets' nest with cotton. The hornets removed the cotton by chewing off the fibres that held it to the nest, and then proceeded to change the entrance by carrying it farther around toward the wall of the house, so that the feat of stopping it up was not so easy. Was this an act of intelligence, or only an evidence of the plasticity or resourcefulness of instinct? But if a dog in stalking a woodchuck (and I have been told of such things) at the critical moment were to rush to the woodchuck's hole so as to get there before it, this were an act of intelligence. To hunt and stalk is instinctive in the dog, but to correlate its act to that of its prey in this manner would show the triumph of intelligence over instinct.

II

Huxley thought that because of the absence of language the brutes can have no trains of thought but only trains of feeling, and this is the opinion of most comparative psychologists. I am myself quite ready to admit that the lower animals come as near to reasoning as they come to having a language. Their various cries and calls- the call to the mate, to the young, the cry of anger, of fear, of alarm, of pain, of joy - do serve as the medium of some sort of communication, but they do not stand for ideas or mental concepts any more than the various cries of a child do. They are the result of simple reactions to outward objects or to inward wants, and do not imply any mental process whatever. A grown person may utter a cry of pain or fear or pleasure with a mind utterly blank of any ideas. Once on a moonlight night I lay in wait for some boy poachers in my vineyard. As I suddenly rose up, clad in a long black cloak, and rushed for one and seized his leg as he was hastening over the fence, he uttered a wild, agonized scream precisely as a wild animal does when suddenly seized. He told me afterward that he was fairly frightened out of his wits. For the moment he was simply an unreasoning animal.

A language has to be learned, but the animals all use their various calls and cries instinctively.