480 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



lisliment broken up, the surviving cock bird removed to a new 

 cage, and the hatching cage itself thoroughly cleansed and puri- 

 fied, and put aside till the following spring. Never, however, 

 could any bird afterward endure being placed in that cage. They 

 fought and struggled to get out, and, if all in vain their efforts, 

 they moped, huddling close together, thoroughly unhappy, re- 

 fusing to be comforted by any amount of sunshine, companion- 

 ship, or dainty food." The experiment was tried with foreign 

 birds, that had not been in the house when the death of the hen 

 occurred, and could not, therefore, have known anything of the 

 melancholy event by observation. The result, however, was al- 

 ways the same. " For the future that cage to them was haunted." 



It is a common belief that many animals can see ghosts and 

 future events. Justinus Kerner declares (Die Seherin von Pre- 

 vorst, i, 125) that they are endowed with second sight, and that 

 numerous facts can be adduced in proof of it. This uncanny 

 faculty is supposed to be especially strong in dogs and horses. 

 Storks, too, are known to have foreseen the burning of houses on 

 which they had been wont to build their nests, and to have aban- 

 doned them, taking up their abode on other buildings or on trees 

 in the vicinity. No sooner had the anticipated conflagration 

 taken place, and a new house been erected on the same site, than 

 they returned and built their nests on it as heretofore. That Ba- 

 laam's ass perceived the angel, which was beyond the ken of the 

 prophet, ought to suffice to convince every believer in the plenary 

 inspiration of the Bible of the specter-seeing powers of the lower 

 animals. The ghost stories told of dogs and horses are quite as 

 numerous and well authenticated as those which have been told 

 of men. There is no psychological theory of apparitions that 

 does not explain these strange phenomena as satisfactorily in 

 beasts as in human beings. The night side of Nature casts its 

 gloom over both. 



Of course, if religion is a direct and special revelation to man, 

 then no sentient creature prior and inferior to him could have 

 any share in it. The hypothesis of a pure primitive monotheism, 

 of which all polytheistic systems of belief are mere distortions 

 and degradations, would also tend to exclude the lower animals 

 from the possession of religious sentiment by showing that the 

 religious history of the race has been a downward instead of an 

 upward movement, a corruption instead of an evolution. Its 

 growth would not correspond to the growth of intelligence, and 

 it could no longer be studied as a psychological phenomenon, but 

 would be removed at once from the province of scientific inves- 

 tigation. There can be no science of the supernatural, since sci- 

 ence recognizes only the operation of natural laws. A miracle 

 that can be explained, as the rationalistic school of theology has 



