260 MENTAL CONSTITUTION OF ANIMALS. 



form of psychological manifestation usually called instinct ; but 

 instinct is only another term for mind, or is mind in a peculiar 

 state of development ; and though the fact were otherwise, it 

 could not affect the conclusion, that manifestations such as 

 have been enumerated are mainly intellectual manifestations, 

 not to be distinguished as such from those of human 

 beings. 



More than this, the lower animals manifested mental pheno- 

 mena long before man existed. While as yet there was no 

 brain capable of working out a mathematical problem, the 

 economy of the six-sided figure was exemplified by the instinct 

 of the bee. The dog and the elephant prefigured the sagacity 

 of the human mind. The love of a human mother for her 

 babe was anticipated by nearly every humbler mammal, the 

 carnivora not excepted. The peacock strutted, the turkey 

 blustered, and the cock fought for victory, just as human beings 

 afterwards did, and still do. Our faculty of imitation, from 

 which so much amusement is derived, was exercised by the 

 mocking-bird ; and the whole tribe of monkeys must have 

 walked about the pre-human world, playing off those tricks in 

 which we see the comicality and mischief-making of our own 

 character so whimsically exaggerated. 



The unity and simplicity which characterize nature, give 

 great antecedent probability to what observation seems about 

 to establish, that, as the brain of the vertebrata generally is 

 only an advanced condition of a particular ganglion in the 

 mollusca and Crustacea, so are the brains of the higher and 

 more intelligent mammalia only further developments of the 

 brains of the inferior orders of the same class. Or, to the same 

 purpose, it may be said, that each species has certain superior 

 developments, according to its requirements, while others are 

 in a rudimental or repressed state. This will more clearly 

 appear, after some inquiry has been made into the various 

 powers comprehended under the term mind. 



One of the first and simplest functions of mind is to give 

 consciousness- consciousness of our identity and of our existence. 

 This, apparently, is independent of the senses, which are simply 

 media, and, as Locke has shown, the only media, through 

 which ideas respecting the external world reach the brain. 

 The access of such ideas to the brain is the act to which the 

 metaphysicians have given the name of perception. Gall, how- 

 ever, has put forth a theory of mind, alleged to be founded in- 

 ductively on a vast number of actual cases, from which it would 



