1899] THE MAN IN THE BEAST 435 



be immensely large. After waving the standard of accuracy in the 

 preface, the author might have refrained from citing in the body of his 

 book data " given to me at a certain club banquet where I had no 

 facilities for noting them down." 



The author's loving enthusiasm for animal life, his desire to be 

 generous in his appreciation of its psychical aspects, and his diligence 

 in making personal observations and experiments command our admira- 

 tion, and yet, except as an emotional protest against an extreme form 

 of the theory of animal automatism, he has spoilt his work by the 

 common error of mixing up observation and inference. This error is 

 so insidious that no one, perhaps, escapes uninfected by it, but our 

 author exposes himself to it wantonly. " Time and again," he says, " I 

 have seen a snail draw in its horns when it perceived the white ball, 

 to it an unknown and terror-inspiring object " ; — the inference that the 

 ball was terror-inspiring is unproved. " Oysters kept in a reservoir 

 and occasionally uncovered learn to keep their shells closed, . . . this 

 is an act of intelligence." " I also saw a spider which intentionally 

 beautified its web by affixing to it hundreds of minute flakes of logwood- 

 dye." The honey-making ants " have evolved the idea of setting aside 

 certain members of the colony as honey-makers." Even a sea-anemone 

 has acquired the habit of " letisimulation " or death-feigning, for " I 

 reached down my hand for it, when, presto ! it shrivelled and shrunk like 

 a flash into an unsightly green lump, and appeared nothing more than 

 a moss-covered nodule of rock." " The champion death-feigner of the 

 vegetable kingdom is a South American plant, Mimosa pudica" but in this 

 case the author allows that the death-feigning is not due to conscious 

 determination. He is convinced, however, by actual experimentation, 

 that his fox-terrier falls into " brown-studies," " just as man does " ; and 

 asks if the dog may not then " claim one kind of abstraction." But 

 one more example must suffice, for our entertainment is shadowed 

 with a feeling of sadness. " I have seen my dog chase imaginary rats 

 around my room after having been aroused while in the midst of a 

 dream. His chagrin when he ' came to himself ' and saw me laughing 

 was always strikingly apparent." The author should seriously consider 

 what Huxley meant when he said " the assertion that outstrips the 

 evidence is not only a blunder, but a crime." 



The value of the book except as a warning is in the author's 

 personal observations — if only he had given them to us untainted by 

 inference, but the point of the book is a protest against denying 

 intelligence to animals. " Instinct," he says, " is the bugbear of 

 psychology, and does more to retard investigation than any other 

 factor. As long as people of the creationist stamp wield the instinct- 

 club, just so long will they be unable to grasp the idea of intelligent 

 ratiocination in the lower animals." We could understand this protest if 

 it were true that modern workers in comparative psychology believed 

 that all animals were, as Dr. Bethe holds in regard to ants and bees, 



