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moss and moisture, and here the root makes its way. When it reaches the edge of the rocks, it bends down just as a fluid would do and continues its course till it reaches the ground; then it rejoices, so to speak. All other roots are called in or dry up, this one root increases till it is like a continuation of the trunk itself, and a new root system is established in the ground. But why we find the birch more often established upon a rock than any other tree, I do not yet know.

I know of a little birch tree that is planted in the niche on the face of an almost perpendicular rock in the edge of the woods. There has been a tree, probably a birch, in the same niche before it, and in this mould of its ancestor the tree is planted. It has wedged its roots into the rock wherever there is a seam or crack, and it must have thriven fairly well on its scant rations of soil for several years, or until it became a sapling the size of one's wrist. Then it started a root diagonally down the face of the rock toward the ground, about four feet distant. How that root made its way there on that bare, smooth surface, where there is only a thin wash of lichens, is a mystery. But it did, and it reached the ground and is now the size of a broom handle, and is doubtless the tree's main source of sustenance.

What prompted the tree to send it down, to organize and equip this relief expedition to the soil

across the desert face of the rock? I have always supposed a growing root lived off the country it traveled over, but in this case it must have been fed from the rear; the tree pushed it on even when it brought in no supplies. How interesting it would be to know how far this root would have traveled across that bare rock-face had the ground been many yards away! Have trees more wit than is dreamed of in our philosophy?

The intelligence of the plants and flowers of which Maeterlinck writes so delightfully is, of course, only a manifestation of the general intelligence that pervades all nature. Maeterlinck is usually sound upon his facts, however free and poetic he may be in the interpretation of them. The plants and flowers certainly do some wonderful things; they secure definite ends by definite means and devices, as much so as does man himself-witness the elaborate and ingenious mechanical contrivances by which the orchids secure crossfertilization. Yet if we are to use terms strictly, we can hardly call it intelligence in the human sense, that is, the result of reflection on the part of the plant itself, any more than we can ascribe the general structure and economy of the plant, or of our own bodies, to an individual act of intelligence. There are ten thousand curious and wonderful things in both the animal and vegetable worlds, and in the organic world as well, but it is only in a poetic

and imaginative sense that we can speak of them as the result of intelligence on the part of the things themselves: we personify the things when we do so. The universe is pervaded with mind, or with something for which we have no other name. But it is not as an ingenious machine, say the modern printing-press, is pervaded with mind. The machine is a senseless tool in the hands of an external intelligence; in nature we see that the intelligence is within and is inseparable from it. The machine is the result of mind, but things in nature seem the organs of mind.

IX

THE REASONABLE BUT UNREASONING

ANIMALS

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HERE is to me a perennial interest in this

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question of animal instinct versus intelligence, and I trust my readers will pardon me if I again take the question up. Ever since one of our leading weekly journals (last June) declared its belief that “animals are capable of reasoning from certain premises, and do possess and express, though in a rudimentary form, many of the moral and intellectual processes and sentiments of man," I have wanted to take another shot at the subject. I do not now recall that any one has before claimed that the lower animals possess many of the moral sentiments of man, though a goodly number of persons seem to have persuaded themselves that animals do reason. Even so competent a naturalist as Mr. Hornaday says that asking if animals reason is to him like asking if fishes swim. But I suspect that Mr. Hornaday is a better naturalist than he is a comparative psychologist, because all the eminent comparative psychologists, so far as I know them,

have reached the conclusion that animals do not reason. That eminent German psychologist, Wundt, says that the entire intellectual life of animals can be accounted for on the simple law of association; and Lloyd Morgan, the greatest of living English comparative psychologists, in his discussion of the question, "Do animals reason?" concludes that they do not they do "not perceive the why and think the therefore." He urges, very justly, I think, that "in no case is an animal's activity to be interpreted as the outcome of a higher psychic faculty if it can fairly be interpreted as the outcome of faculties which are lower in the psychological scale." That is to say, Why impute reason to an animal if its behavior can be explained on the theory of instinct?

Some of our later nature writers seek to cut out instinct entirely, and call it all reason. If we cut out instinct, then we have two kinds of reason to account for and our last state is worse than our first. The young dog that in the house takes a bone and goes through the motions of burying it on the kitchen floor, digging the hole, putting it in, covering it up, and pressing the imaginary soil down with his nose, does not show the same kind of intelligence that even a child of four does when she puts her dolly in its little bed and carefully tucks it up. The one act is rational, the other is irrational; one is the result of observation, the other is inherited memory.

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