THE THEORY OF TITTLEBATS. 825 



fluence of habit and heredity, we think that this explanation of Mr. 

 Spencer's is still too exterior. There is an intimate connection, both 

 physiological and psychological, between the cry of distress and the 

 distress itself. The part of heredity and selection is simply to aug- 

 ment more and more the kind of internal sonorousness by which one 

 being responds to the emotion of another. And why does this sono- 

 rousness become stronger as the being has more intelligence ? Because, 

 its power of representation having increased, it can represent to itself 

 with more vivacity what other beings, and in due order itself, feel. 

 But intellectual sympathies are less the true conditions of the affective 

 life than organic sympathies. Intellectual sympathies present a kind 

 of intermittent character ; but the sympathies of the organs among one 

 another never wholly cease till death ; and from this results a constant 

 necessity for sympathy with others which is the extension of the con- 

 cert that was begun in our organism. Translated for the Popular 

 Science Monthly from the Revue des Deux Mondes. 



THE THEORY OF TITTLEBATS. 



THE last theory of tittlebats of which I remember to have heard 

 anything was that broached by Mr. Pickwick in connection with 

 his profound and celebrated researches into the origin of the Hamp- 

 stead Ponds. The suggestion of a causal connection between organism 

 and environment, thus implied by the very title of Mr. Pickwick's 

 paper, might lead one to suppose that the philosopher of the Fleet 

 may have been really an early evolutionist, a Darwinian before Dar- 

 win, and an unconscious precursor of the now fashionable biologists, 

 who account for eveiything on the Topsy principle of supposing that 

 it " growed so." For undoubtedly the tittlebat was developed in, for, 

 and by his native ponds, and any comprehensive theory of his exist- 

 ence and history must necessarily begin with the environment that 

 produced him. Unfortunately, however, nothing now remains of Mr. 

 Pickwick's valuable disquisition, except the bare title, enshrined among 

 the posthumous papers of the club that bore his name ; and I am there- 

 fore compelled, in reconstructing the theory of tittlebats on my own 

 account, entirely to ignore the labors of my distinguished predecessor, 

 and begin again de novo from the very outset. 



The name itself of the tittlebat, I regret to say, appears in Mr. 

 Pickwick's lost memoir in so debased and corrupt a form as scarcely 

 to be recognizable to the philological student. His true title, I need 

 hardly remark in this age of inquiry, ought to be stickleback ; and he 

 is so called in virtue of the stickles, spines, thorns, or prickles which 

 represent and replace the first dorsal fin in all his kindred. But 

 though the stickleback is so small a fish as even to have excited the 



