THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 57 



amusing and intelligent beast I ever saw. She will poke a straw 

 through the keyhole or a small gimlet-hole in the boards when 

 told. She will put a straw as a flower in the keeper's button-hole, 

 or brush his coat when told. She will keep pence in a hole and 

 drop them into the keeper's pocket to pay for beef-tea, which she 

 will drink with a spoon, returning the spoon through any indicated 

 division of the network, and numberless other tricks, and she is 

 constantly acquiring new ones. On the 7th of February last I 

 was there, and she had her arm out of the cage, with the back of 

 the hand upward. A solitary fly, which had survived in the warm 

 house, alighted upon it, which Sally evidently wished to capture. 

 She fixed her eyes on it and drew in her hand and arm very 

 slowly and gently, and without moving any other part of her body. 

 She got it nearly in, but as the hand passed through the wire net- 

 ting it touched, and the fly was frightened and flew ; instantly, quick 

 as lightning, Sally darted out the other hand and made a grab at it. 

 She did not catch it, but could anything be more human or more 

 evidently reasoned ? The conclusion which I draw from all this is, 

 that whether instinct and reason be separate things or not, or 

 whether instinct be only reason grown habitual and inherited, yet 

 that in either case the nature of the mind of the lower animals is 

 the same as that of man ; and that it is a question of degree and 

 not of kind ; man and animals may each have both instinct and 

 reason. The mind of the lowest savage is probably far above that 

 of Sally, but it seems to me to be only a higher development of the 

 same thing. 



All this may prove evolution to be true, but it does not prove 

 that Darwin's is the correct explanation of it ; but survival of the 

 fittest and sexual selection are so familiar to you, and in some form 

 or other are so continually before you, that I do not propose to 

 repeat this theory, nor the numerous facts in support of it, but 

 rather to utilize the little time remaining to me in considering a 

 few of the points, and the objections and limits to these laws if 

 any. And firstly let me call your attention to the fact that 

 Darwin never asserted that these laws explained everything, and 

 his principal opponents, such as St. George Mivart, did not deny 

 that they had some operation ; but whereas Darwin assigned them 

 the principal place, Mivart allowed them only a small influence. 

 Darwin in his later writings was rather inclined to limit than to 

 extend these laws. With regard to the existence of the tendency to 



