364 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



unknown seas by the aid of the same geographical second-sight which 

 guided the Philadelphia pigeons to their native roost. According to 

 a well-authenticated report, the crew of a British East Indiaman caught 

 an enormous tortoise near St. Helena, marked it with the brand of the 

 company, and quartered it in the cockpit, but in the English Channel 

 their captive crawled on deck and plunged overboard. Two years 

 after, the same tortoise was caught in Sandy Bay near Jamestown, on 

 the south coast of St. Helena. No ocean-current could have carried it 

 there ; it must have navigated by its inner compass a distance of seven 

 thousand English miles. 



Should the occult sense be merely an unknown function of a well- 

 known organ ? A person whose eyesight is limited to the range of 

 his ear-shot would fail to comprehend how an earthly being could see 

 stars beyond the boundaries of the solar system, and a nation of mole- 

 eyed men would speak of the instinct that enables a homo of a differ- 

 ent species to reach a distant village by keeping his eye on the steeple. 

 "We may have a dormant rudiment of that same sixth sense. Perhaps 

 it awakens in the pulmonary beatitude that expands our chests in the 

 atmosphere of a sunlit forest, or in the nausea induced by the effluvium 

 of a stagnant bayou. Neither sensation is necessarily dependent on 

 the olfactory sense. 



We have lost several faculties from sheer disuse, but it is not 

 probable that their number includes the instinct of orientation. It is 

 deficient in many of our fellow creatures, both of the higher and lower 

 orders. Monkeys, sheep, black cattle, gallinaceous birds, lizards, and 

 lepidopterous insects seem to be almost devoid of it. Should we not 

 be able to detect some characteristic structural difference between 

 monkeys, chickens, and lizards on the one hand, and dogs, pigeons, and 

 tortoises on the other ? A peculiar instinct must correspond to some 

 peculiar organization, and I think that specialty could be determined 

 in the domestic dog if anywhere. For many reasons the modus ope- 

 randi of a function can be more easily observed in a docile mammal 

 than in a reptile or a shy bird, and, if we hope to force the intrench- 

 ments of the enigma, we had better "fight it out^ on this line." If 

 one of the five senses should be the functional medium of the strange 

 instinct, there must be ways and means to identify it ; if there is such 

 a thing as a sixth sense, we should be able to locate its organ. The 

 " intuitive cerebration " theory is untenable. In the well-known axiom 

 that nothing comes within the ken of our intellect but what has entered 

 by the gate of the senses, we may confidently substitute " intuition " 

 for " intellect." In other words, we have few reasons to doubt and 

 many reasons to suspect that every psychic emotion, as well as per- 

 ception, is the reflex of some organic impression. 



