256 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



port the eye by their forms, shows me a wave from the sea with 

 its reflected and refracted colors harmoniously mingled with the 

 bottom tints issuing from the deep and with the proper color of 

 the water itself, my arms, as they say, fall from my body. And 

 it is then hard for me to realize that the colors of water in gen- 

 eral are composed of a multitude of factors, among which the 

 most important are the normal blue of pure water, the mirror- 

 colors of the surface, the refracted colors of the moving parts, the 

 proper colors of bodies swimming in the water, and the colors of 

 the bottom or of only very softly illuminated parts shining up 

 through the mass. 



In this, as in everything, the principle is true that there are 

 no simple phenomena in Nature, but that all are only the result 

 of a number of single factors, the aggregate effect of which we 

 observe and perceive with a very imperfect instrument our eye. 

 Translated for The Popular Science Monthly from Die Oarten- 

 laube. 



-- 



THE ANIMAL VIEW OF MAN. 



ONE of the most curious and unconsciously paradoxical claims 

 ever advanced for man in his relation to animals, is that by 

 which M. Georges Leroy, philosopher, encyclopedist, and lieu- 

 tenant des chasses of the Park of Versailles, the vindicator of 

 Buffon and Montesquieu against the criticisms of Voltaire, ex- 

 plains in his Lettres sur les Animaux the intellectual debt which 

 the carnivorous animals owe to human persecution. He pictures 

 with wonderful cleverness the development of their powers of 

 forethought, memory, and reasoning which the interference of 

 man, the enemy and " rival," forces upon them, and the conse- 

 quent intellectual advance which distinguishes the loup jeune et 

 ignorant from the loup adulte et instruit. The philosophic lieu- 

 tenant des chasses had before long ample opportunities for com- 

 paring the " affinities " which he had discovered between civilized 

 man and " instructed " wolves, in the experiences of the French 

 Revolution ; but without following his fortunes in those troublous 

 times for game-preservers, we may perhaps return to the question 

 of the natural relation of animals to man, which, as pictured by 

 Rousseau to prove his a priori notions of a state of nature, so justly 

 incurred the criticism of the practical observer and practiced 

 writer, M. Georges Leroy. 



That man is, generally speaking, from the animal's point of 

 view, an object of fear, hostility, or rapine, is to-day most unfortu- 

 nately true. But whether this is their natural relation, and not 

 one induced, and capable perhaps of change, is by no means cer- 



