642 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



souls, we see, were almost universally disputed to tliem at the 

 end of the seventeenth century, even by those who did not abso- 

 lutely bring them down to machinery. Even within the recollec- 

 tion of many, it was common to deny them any kind of reasoning 

 faculty, and to solve their most sagacious actions by the vague 

 word instinct. We have come in late years to think better of our 

 humble companions ; and, as usual in similar cases, the prepon- 

 derant bias seems rather too much of a leveling character." Dur- 

 ing the half century that has elapsed since these words were writ- 

 ten, not only has zoology made still greater progress in the direc- 

 tion indicated, but a new science of zoopsychology has sprung 

 up, in which the mental traits and moral qualities of the lower 

 animals have been, not merely recorded as curious and comical 

 anecdotes, but systematically investigated and philosophically 

 explained. In consequence of this radical change of view, human 

 society in general has become more philozoic, not upon religious 

 or sentimental but upon strictly scientific grounds, and devel- 

 oped a sympathy and solidarity with the animal world, having 

 its sources less in the tender and transitory emotions of the heart 

 than in the profound and permanent convictions of the mind. 



In an essay published a few years ago in The Dublin Review 

 (October, 1887, p. 418), the Right Rev. John Cuthbert Hedley, 

 Bishop of Newport and Menevia, asserts that animals have no 

 rights, because they are not rational creatures and do not exist 

 for their own sake. " The brute creation have only one purj^ose, 

 and that is to minister to man, or to man's temporary abode." 

 This is the doctrine set forth more than six centuries ago by 

 Thomas Aquinas, and recently expounded by Dr. Leopold Schutz, 

 professor in the theological seminary at Treves, in an elaborate 

 work entitled The So-called Understanding of Animals or Ani- 

 mal Instinct. This writer treats the theory of the irrationality 

 of brutes as a dogma of the Church, denouncing all who hold 

 that the mental diiierence between man and beast is one of degree, 

 and not of kind, as " enemies of the Christian faith " ; whereas 

 those who cling to the old notion of instinctive or automatic 

 action in explaining the phenomena of animal intelligence are 

 extolled as " champions of pure truth." 



If it was the Creator's intention that the lower animals should 

 minister to man, the divine plan has proved to be a failure, since 

 the number of animals which, after centuries of ejffort, he has 

 succeeded in bringing more or less under his dominion is ex- 

 tremely small. Millions of living creatures fly in the air, crawl 

 on the earth, dwell in the waters, and roam the fields and the 

 forests, over which he has no control whatever. Not one in 

 twenty thousand is fit for food, and of those which are edible he 

 does not actually eat more than one in ten thousand. In explana- 



