656 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



will ; that is, the dog may end at the stage in which every child, 

 even the most highly endowed, is found at some period of his devel- 

 opment. It is a condition unquestionably in advance, by far, of that 

 of scores of tribes. Moreover, as in the child and the less endowed 

 morally of men, even such ideas of the right are powerfully operative 

 in producing courses of useful conduct. They lead to action on the 

 one hand, and to restraint on the other, instances of which, in the 

 case of the dog, are abundant, and some of them of a most touching, 

 we might almost say ennobling, character. To affirm that the idea of 

 right and wrong of the lower animals does not rise above the hope of 

 reward and the fear of punishment is not to keep to the facts, unless 

 we include as the only reward, in many cases, the master's approba- 

 tion, and the only punishment his displeasure. When a child arrives 

 at such a stage of feeling, most persons would not be inclined to deny 

 it a moral nature and a very good one, too. We might almost speak 

 of a dog having a religion, with man as his deity. But as a whole 

 host of qualities — some of them difficult to classify — go to make up 

 the character of the human individual so developed and balanced as 

 to deserve the epithet "gentleman," so there are many qualities in the 

 best specimens of the canine race that we can practically appreciate 

 better than define. 



In all such discussions it must be borne in mind that if we adopt 

 the theory of organic evolution we are almost bound, of necessity, to 

 a belief in the origin and gradual development of mind from the 

 faintest glimmerings of consciousness, in the simplest protoplasmic 

 creatures ; and that system will be most philosophical and complete 

 which can fill up the gaps between the lowest manifestation of any 

 quality and the highest. Hence, many are inclined to believe that 

 the great distinction between man's faculties and those of animals 

 lower in the scale is difference in degree and not in kind, certainly in 

 so far as they run parallel. Such a view does not prevent our con- 

 ceiving of additional forms of psychic activity not represented in man 

 as the possession of the brutes. That such seems probable will appear 

 when we discuss some of the problems still demanding solution. Nor 

 does such a view imply that there may not be avenues of knowledge 

 of a special kind open to man which are closed to those lower in the 

 scale, Mich as a special revelation from a higher source. So far as we 

 see, indeed, there are no theological difficulties any more than with 

 evolution as ordinarily applied to animal and plant forms. 



.Man's present superiority over the lower animals is traceable in 

 large part to his eminently social tendencies, resulting in the division 

 of labor, with its consequent development of special aptitudes and its 

 outcome in the enormous amount of force which he can, on occasion, 

 bring to bear against the various tendencies making for his dcstnu - 

 tion. Indeed, the isolated individual man is scarcely as well pre- 

 pared in the struggle for existence as most other animals. But the 



