Wellington Philosophical Society. 693 



no means explained any unusual cleverness or exceptional genius. For 

 instance, the musical genius of Mozart coulcl hardly be expected to be 

 produced out of thin air, and yet it could certainly not be called " in- 

 herited." Reason had little to explain to us why JMozart as a child was a 

 fiiaished musician, and analogies drawn from one order of beings should 

 be used with great caution if applied to explain difficulties in regard to 

 other kinds of creatures. Experiments had recently been made which 

 show that when insects are subjected to the different-coloured bands of 

 light thrown down by the spectroscope they display different modes of 

 action — lying dormant under one colour, growing intensely excited iinder 

 another, and so on. It is possible that they live in quite another world 

 than ours so far as impression produced by the senses is concerned; that 

 phenomena which appear beautiful or terrifying to us make no impression 

 upon them ; and that knowledge which to us is a sealed book may be to 

 them as an open scroll. The sense of touch in human beings is ab- 

 solutely null and void compared with that sense in the ant, which almost 

 certainly communicates intelligibly with its fellows by means of contact- 

 ing antennffi ; while the sense of smell in civilised man is almost as 

 feeble as it is useless. It is quite conceivable that other creatures have 

 other senses the effects of which are no more to be appreciated by us 

 than the tints of a landscape or a flower would be by a blind man. 



Mr. Carlile, in reply, said he found that he had not been wrong in his 

 anticipation that his instances of animal intelligence would be capped 

 by others. He could not see how Mr. Harding's view as to what appeared 

 to be the results of hereditary memory would square with the facts. The 

 qualities of a thing were simply the impressions it made on the senses — 

 its colour, smell, and so on ; and to say that the horror which a New-Zea- 

 land-bred horse felt for what looked like a snake was possibly not owing 

 to hereditary memory, but to the horse's perception of some, to us, occult 

 quality, conveyed no meaning to his mind. The theory of an inverse 

 ratio between instinct and reason, started, he thought, by Sir W. 

 Hamilton, accorded with some of the facts of natural history, but was far 

 from being true universally. He cited from Wallace's " Malayan Archi- 

 pelago " what seemed an instance in point of its truth. A baby orang- 

 outang which they captured, belonging as it did to the anthropomorphic 

 apes, showed all the characteristics of the human baby as regarded its 

 utter helplessness, the result being that its captors nursed and tended 

 it, and became greatly attached to it. The young of monkeys, however low 

 down in the intellectual scale, were much more capable of taking care of 

 themselves at an early age. 



Fourth Meeting : Sth. Angust, 1891. 

 E. Tregear, President, in the chair. 



Sir James Hector gave a short description of tlie geo- 

 lof^ical structure of the country from the Kaikouras to the 

 southern part of Canterbury, and referred especially to the 

 recent earthquakes in that district, as described in the late 

 reports of the Geological Department. 



Mr. A. McKay, Assistant Geologist, then exhibited about 

 a hundred views, taken by himself, on the sci-een, to illus- 

 trate the above remarks. As each view was shown Sir 

 James Hector made descriptive remarks. The view^s were 

 much admired, and a vote of thanks was accorded to Sir 

 James Hector and Mr. McKay. 



