138 Transactions of the Society. 



before his day by Felix Dujardin, to whom is solely due the dis- 

 covery of what the Foraniinifera really are, a discovery beyond 

 which no zoologist has made any essential progress.* 



I cannot agree that the long passage quoted from Dr. Carpenter 

 weakens the foundations of a belief in the remarkable pre-eminence 

 of the Foraminifera as exhibiting phenomena of purposiveness ; 

 on the contrary, I claim Carpenter as the earliest and most 

 convinced and convincing supporter of the views which I have 

 expressed. The passage quoted by Sir Eay Lankester is one of 

 the countless illustrations contained in that fascinating work of 

 the unconsciously, but essentially " purposive " processes to be 

 observed among the lower animals. The primary object of the 

 author was to lead up from these phenomena exhibited by the 

 lower animals to the reflex actions — e.g. coughing— of the higher 

 animals, and he comments upon them later on (Op. cit. pp. 56, 57) 

 that " instinctive actions are as truly ' reflex ' in their character 

 as those we have been considering, but differ from them only in 

 their greater complexity ; . . . the truly instinctive actions ot the 

 lower animals correspond in character with the sensori-motor or 

 consen.s7ial actions in man, but constitute a far larger proportion 

 of theii' entire life work." And a few lines below the passage 

 quoted by Sir Eay Lankester, he makes the startling, but in my 

 opinion justifiable, observation, " The apparent absence of a nervous 

 system is doubtless to be attributed in many instances to the 

 general softness of the tissues of the body (of the Ehizopoda) which 

 prevents it from being clearly made out among them " (Op. cit. 

 p. 44). Surely a passage which we may read side by side with 

 the opinion of Claparede and Lachmann : " Le sarcode des Khizo- 

 podes n'a pas encore trouve son acide chromique."t 



I may perhaps allow myself one or two quotations from tlie 

 same work. He says : " No scientific psychologist has any doubt 

 that there are ' Laws of Thought ' expressing sequences of mental 

 activity which (if we could thoroughly acquaint ourselves with 

 them) would be found as fixed and determinate as the 'Laws of 

 Matter ' ; the difficulty in ascertaining them arising solely from 

 the difficulty in subjecting mental phenomena to precise observa- 

 tion, and in analysing the complex conditions under which they 

 occur, there are a gTcat number of mental phenomena which 

 cannot be accounted for in any other way than as resulting from 

 the operation of a physiological mechanism which may go on not 

 only automatically but even unconsciously.'' | 



The section in the work we are considering devoted to 

 "reflex" and "instinctive" actions, is mainly devoted to proving 



* F. Dujardin, " Observations sur les Cephalopodes Microscopiques." Ann. Sci. 

 Nat., ser. 2, iii. (1835) p. 108 (January) ; p. 312 (June) ; iv. p. 343 (December) ; and 

 Coniptes Rendus, 1835, p. 338 (November). 



t " Etude sur les Infusoires et les Rhizopodes," Mem. Inst. Nat. Genevois, vi. 

 (1858) p. 414. 



X W. B. Carpenter, "Mental Physiology," London, 1874, p. 15. 



