3 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. ' 



they find it possible to maintain that it still remains unproved that 

 any species of animal possesses either knowledge or skill not wholly 

 acquired by each individual. A better acquaintance with the mental 

 peculiarities of the animals is certainly a desideratum, and we hope 

 that this rich field of investigation will not long remain uncultivated. 

 In Macmillarfs Magazine for February there is an account of a series 

 of observations and experiments on young animals by the present 

 writer, which, unless they can be discredited, may reasonably be ex- 

 pected to go far to establish the fact of instinct, the fact of innate 

 knowledge and unacquired skill ; in other words, the phenomena on 

 which the experience-psychology, minus the doctrine of inheritance, 

 can throw no light whatever. Now, had not Mr. Darwin banished 

 from every scientific mind the hypothesis of the miraculous creation 

 of each distinct species of animal just as we see it, with all its strange 

 organs, and, to most people, still stranger instincts, the presumption 

 against a system of human psychology that not only can give no ac- 

 count of the most striking phenomena in the mental life of the animals, 

 but which strongly inclines those who hold it to pronounce such phe- 

 nomena incredible, might not have been so apparent. But, in the 

 present state of our scientific knowledge, such a psychology, profess- 

 ing to be a complete system, is self-condemned. In its fundamen- 

 tal principles the science of mind must be the same for all living 

 creatures. Further, if man be, as is now believed, but the highest, 

 the last, the most complex product of evolution, a system professing 

 to be an analysis and exposition of his mind, yet confessing itself in- 

 competent to deal with the necessarily simpler mental processes of 

 lower creatures, must surely feel itself in an uncomfortably anomalous 

 position. 



It is, however, on the first-mentioned circumstance, the immaturity 

 of the infant at birth, that most stress can be laid. The newly-born 

 babe cannot raise its hand to its mouth, and doubtless for a long time 

 after birth it has no consciousness of the axiom, " Things that are 

 equal to the same thing are equal to one another." The helplessness 

 of infancy is pointed to as furnishing ocular demonstration of the 

 doctrine that, whatever may be the case with the animals, all human 

 knowledge, all human ability to perform useful actions, must be wholly 

 the result of associations formed in the life-history of each individual. 

 But it can surely require little argument to show that this is an entirely 

 unwarranted assumption. It might as well be maintained that, be- 

 cause a child is born without teeth and without hair, the subsequent 

 appearance of these must be referred wholly to the operation of ex- 

 ternal forces. Of the several lines of argument that might here be 

 employed, let us, for the sake of freshness, take the analogy from the 

 lower animals. We are not aware that it can be asserted, as the result 

 of prearranged and careful observations, that any creature at the in- 

 stant of birth exhibits any of the higher instincts. A number of iso- 



