COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY. 651 



There is a very delightful way in which you may tell the hour of 

 day by meaus of flowers. And this is really the most wonderful of all 

 the clocks that have been or can be made, for it requires no winding 

 and no weights, and no hands and no wheels. There are twenty-four 

 varieties of plants whose blossoms open successively at the different 

 hours of the day and night. I will mention only three or four. The 

 African marigold opens at seven in the evening, and closes at four in 

 the morning ; but, if it does not open, the next day will be rainy. 

 Many varieties of the water-lily close and sink into the water at sun- 

 down, to arise and bloom at sunrise. The day-lily opens at five 

 o'clock in the morning, and the morning-glory a little later. The 

 night-blooming cereus opens only at night, and it closes long before 

 the first streak of dawn. 



COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY: ITS OBJECTS AND 



PROBLEMS* 



By T. WESLEY MILLS, M. A., M.D., 



PROFESSOR OF PHYSIOLOGY IN M°GILL UNIVERSITY, MONTREAL. 



THE term comparative psychology, in its modern sense, gives us 

 the widest desirable scope as including all that pertains to the 

 mind or soul of the animal kingdom. It may have been at one time 

 considered as highly impertinent to ask whether the lower animals 

 possess mind, and to substitute the term soul would have been danger- 

 ously suggestive of heterodoxy of a type rapidly to be extinguished. 

 However, few persons of any degree of culture will now be found pre- 

 pared to deny that the inferior animals have minds. The questions 

 now to be settled are : What kind of minds ? In how far do they 

 resemble, and in how far differ from, our own ? Few, it is true, have 

 considered that they sufficiently resemble the human mind to make it 

 worth while to investigate the subject at all. Probably the great mass 

 of persons have been led to believe that man does and always has 

 occupied a distinctive and wholly isolated position in the universe of 

 life — a center around whom and for whom all other forms exist. This 

 view seems to me totally unwarranted by the state of our scientific 

 knowledge at the present day. Further, it is a view not only without 

 scientific foundation, but calculated to lead to pernicious practical 

 results. 



By experiments on the lower animals, and by this means almost 

 wholly, has the science of physiology been built up. We argue from 

 the case in animals to the case in man, and consider the inferences 

 thus derived valuable, even final — possibly too much so ; but we are 



* A presidential address delivered before the Society for the Study of Comparative 

 Psychology. 



