a slow process that no man has witnessed or can witness. Strike out the element of time, and we see it as we see the stalk bring forth the flower, or as we see the grub metamorphosed into the butterfly.

We turn smoke into flame by supplying the fire with a little more oxygen. Has any new thing been added? What is added to transmute animal intelligence into human seems to be only more oxygen more of that which favors mental combustion more brain matter and a finer nervous organization.

III

We translate the action of bird and beast into human thought just as we translate their cries and calls into human speech. But the bird does not utter the words we ascribe to it, it only makes a sound that suggests the words. So its behavior is not the result of thought, but it is such as to suggest thought to a thinking animal, and we proceed to explain it in terms of thought.

We see a crow approaching a bit of meat upon the lawn in winter and note his suspicion. He circles about and surveys it from all points and approaches it with extreme caution, and we say he suspects some trap or concealed enemy, or plot to do him injury, when in fact he does not consciously suspect anything or think anything; he is simply obeying his inborn instinct to be on the lookout for danger at all times and in all places - the instinct

of self-preservation. When the chickadee comes to the bone or bit of suet upon the tree under your window, it does so with little or no signs of suspicion. Its enemies are of a different kind, and its instincts work differently. Or when we see a fox trying to elude or delay the hound that is pursuing him, by taking to rail fences or bare plowed fields, or to the ice of frozen streams, we say he knows what he is doing; he knows his scent will not lie upon the rail or the bare earth or the ice as upon the snow or the moist ground. We translate his act into our mental concepts. The fox is, of course, trying to elude or to shake off his pursuer, but he is not drawing upon his stores of natural knowledge or his powers of thought to do so; he does not realize as you or I would that it is the scent of his foot that gives the clue to his enemy. How can he have any general ideas about odors and surfaces that best retain them? He is simply obeying the instinctive cunning of his vulpine nature, and takes to the fence or to the ice or to the water as a new expedient when others have failed. Such a course on our part under like circumstances would be the result of some sort of mental process, but with the fox it is evidence of the flexibility and resourcefulness of instinct. The animals all do rational things without reason, cunning things without calculation, and provident things without forethought. Of course we have to fall back upon

instinct to account for their acts that natural "propensity," as Paley defined it, which is "prior to experience and independent of instruction.”

In both the animal and vegetable worlds we see a kind of intelligence that we are always tempted to describe in terms of our own intelligence; it seems to run parallel to and to foreshadow our own as to ways and means and getting on in the world

propagation, preservation, dissemination, adaptation the plant resorting to many ingenious devices to scatter its seed and to secure cross-fertilization; the animal eluding its enemies, hiding its door or its nest, finding its way, securing its food, and many other things - all exhibiting a kind of intelligence that is independent of instruction or experience, and that suggests human reason without being one with it. Each knows what its kind knows, and each does what its kind does, but only in man do we reach self-knowledge and the freedom of conscious intelligence.

The animals all profit more or less by experience, and this would at first thought seem to imply some sort of mental capacity. But vegetables profit by experience also, and mainly in the same way, by increasing power to live and multiply. Hunt an animal and it becomes wary and hardy; persecute a plant and it, too, seems to tighten its hold upon life. How hardy and prolific are the weeds against which every man's hand is turned! How full of

resources they are; how they manage to shift for themselves, while the cultivated plants are tender and helpless in comparison! Pull up redroot in your garden and lay it on the ground, and the chances are that one or more rootlets that come in contact with the soil will take hold again and enable the plant to mature part of its seeds. This adaptability and tenacity of life is, no doubt, the result of the warfare waged against this weed by long generations of gardeners. Natural selection steps in and preserves the most hardy. Of course the individual animal profits more by experience than the individual plant, yet the individual plant profits also. Do not repeated transplantings make a plant more hardy and increase its chances of surviving? If it does not learn something, it acquires new powers, it profits by adversity.

IV

But as the animal is nearer to us than the vegetable, so is animal intelligence nearer akin to our own than plant intelligence. We hear of plant physiology, but not yet of plant psychology. When a plant growing in a darkened room leans toward the light, the leaning, we are taught, is a purely mechanical process, the effect of the light upon the cells of the plant brings it about in a purely mechanical way; but when an animal is drawn to the light, the process is a much more complex one,

and implies a nervous system. It is thought by some that the roots of a water-loving plant divine the water from afar and run toward it. The truth is, the plant or tree sends its roots in all directions, but those on the side of the water find the ground moister in that direction and their growth is accelerated, while the others are checked by the dryness of the soil. An ash tree stood on a rocky slope where the soil is thin and poor, twenty or twentyfive feet from my garden. After a while it sent so many roots down into the garden, and so robbed the garden vegetables of the fertilizers, that we cut the roots off and dug a trench to keep the tree from sending more. Now the gardener thought the tree divined the rich pasturage down below there and reached for it accordingly. The truth is, I suppose, that the roots on that side found a little more and better soil, and so pushed on till they reached the garden, where they were at once so well fed that they multiplied and extended themselves rapidly. Both plant and tree know a good thing when they find it. How could they continue if they did not? A birch tree starting life upon the top of a rock, as birch trees more than any others are wont to do, where the soil is thin, soon starts a root down to the ground several feet below in what seems a very intelligent way. Now the tree cannot know that the ground is there within reach. On one side of the rock, usually on the north side, it finds