JESTHETICISM AND RELIGION IN ANIMALS. 479 



throwing them to a distance, and generally giving them the ap- 

 pearance of animation, in order to give himself the ideal pleasure 

 of worrying them. On one occasion, therefore, I tied a long and 

 fine thread to a dry bone and gave him the latter to play with. 

 After he had tossed it about for a short time I took the opportu- 

 nity, when it had fallen at a distance from him and while he was 

 following it up, of gently drawing it away from him by means 

 of the long, invisible thread. Instantly his whole demeanor 

 changed. The bone, which he had previously pretended to be 

 alive, began to look as if it were really alive, and his astonish- 

 ment knew no bounds. He first approached it with nervous cau- 

 tion, but, as the slow receding motion continued and he became 

 quite certain that the movement could not be accounted for by 

 any residuum of force which he had himself communicated, his 

 astonishment developed into dread, and he ran to conceal himself 

 under some articles of furniture, there to behold at a distance the 

 ' uncanny ' spectacle of a dry bone coming to life." In this in- 

 stance we have the exercise of close observation, judgment, rea- 

 son, and imagination culminating in the exhibition of supersti- 

 tious fear — all the elements, in short, which constitute religious 

 sentiment in its crudest form. 



Animals are afraid of darkness for the same reason that chil- 

 dren are. Thunder, lightning, and other violent meteorological 

 phenomena, which inspire the primitive man with awe and there- 

 fore play a prominent part in the evolution of early mythology, 

 produce a similar impression upon many of the lower animals, 

 simply because they are mysterious noises which appeal to the 

 imagination and stimulate the mythopoeic faculty. Mr. Romanes 

 states that " on one occasion, when a number of apples were being 

 shot out of bags upon the wooden floor of an apple-room, the 

 sound in the house as each bag was shot closely resembled that of 

 distant thunder." A setter was greatly alarmed at the noise until 

 he was taken to the apple-room and shown the cause of it, after 

 which " his dread entirely left him, and on again returning to the 

 house he listened to the rumbling with all cheerfulness." Dogs 

 and horses can be completely cured of their fear of thunder by 

 being present at artillery practice ; they imagine that they now 

 know what produces the dreadful roar, and are henceforth free 

 from all apprehension concerning it. 



To some extent this sense of the supernatural seems to enter 

 into the sphere of pure imagination and to excite in the minds of 

 animals those vague feelings of anxiety and alarm arising from 

 mere figments of the brain and characterized as superstition. 

 The following incident, " illustrating the instinctive fear of death 

 and consciousness of its presence manifested by birds," is related 

 by Buist: "A hen canary died, was buried, the nesting estab- 



