The Scottish Naturalist. 207 



and the hoarding up of results in the shape of truth, during the 

 secular periods that have been allotted to them. These 

 periods of probation have been multiplied to them above those 

 allotted to man ; but with what result ? Mr. Huxley has ex- 

 pressed it when he says, " Man has accumulated and organised 

 the experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation of 

 every individual life in other animals" (Man's Place, &c, 112). 

 He says "almost wholly lost." True, a pointer can have his 

 instincts somewhat improved by human care, and skill, and 

 whipping. And he can bequeath the accumulation to his pos- 

 terity ; and if the means of training at the hands of man are 

 persevered in, the forced result in the shape of education may 

 be considerable. At the most, it is plainly a limited, not an 

 indefinitely augmentable, result. And if the means were 

 neglected, what would the dog grow to ? He would ungrow 

 very soon the whole product of his laborious education, and re- 

 trograde to his own place. There is a fixity about animals most 

 unlike anything about man. As Sumner says, " Animals are 

 born what they are intended to remain. Nature has bestowed 

 on them a certain rank, and limited the extent of their capacity 

 by an impassible decree. Man she has empowered and obliged 

 to become the artificer of his own rank in the scale of beings, 

 by the peculiar gift of improvable reason" (ap. Lyell Antiq., 

 &c, 497). Mr. Huxley has ascribed this accumulative power of 

 man to the " possession of the marvellous endowment of intelli- 

 gible and rational speech." But it is not speech, the logos pro- 

 forikos, that is to be credited with this result. The achievement 

 must rather be laid to the account of the logos endiathetos, the 

 archbishop's " improveable reason." The amassed truth, the 

 organised experience that exists in the body of human knowledge 

 and science ; the self-culture, which the mere life-bound soul of 

 the animal does not need, but which a self constantly craves, 

 and to which every man may make his acquaintance with 

 objects and beings beyond himself subservient ; and the fact 

 that every man is capable of adding, in his measure, a con- 

 tribution to the accumulated store ; all this forms one of 

 the broadest and most glaring distinctions between animals 

 and man. 



As, moreover, there is no self-development in the animal in- 

 tellectually, so there is no self-aggrandisement, so to speak, in 

 things material. There is no wealth, no trade, no commerce, 

 no industrial occupation. The whole outward life is diverse 



