72, Boundary between Man (January, 
shown in the following incident, which is no fable or apo- 
logue, but the literal record of a fact:—A certain man in 
the North of England had two sons, not palpably idiots, but 
what are locally known as “softies.” One of these was 
suddenly missing. He was traced to a wood near the town, 
but there the clue was lost, and all search proved vain. In 
the afternoon the other “ softy ”’ begged that he might go in 
quest of his lost brother. The proposal was accepted, and 
the boy—followed at some little distance by his father—en- 
tered the wood. He sauntered carelessly up and down, with 
his eyes fixed on the ground, constantly shouting—‘‘ Aw see 
thee, Johnnie!” Suddenly a voice from the midst of a 
dense thicket replied—‘‘ Nay, thou duzzant.” What wise 
man could thus understand the workings of .a fool’s mind ? 
The real “‘ Encomium Morie”’ has yet to be written. These 
considerations will go far to explain the frequent failure of 
men of genius to secure the ordinary material prizes of life, 
—a failure by no means invariably due, as sometimes 
asserted, to extravagance, indolence, or intemperance. 
This opinion will certainly be voted flat blasphemy against 
that god of the modern world, the ‘‘ self-made man.” His 
worshippers, literary or illiterate, may not relish the impu- 
tation that the peculiar and profitable gift of their idol for 
over-reaching inventors, customers, workmen, and all sorts 
and conditions of people, is nothing divine, but merely a 
slavish—and even a currish—faculty. 
To return :—What wonder that man fails to understand 
the lower animals, just as the master is unable to under- 
stand the slave, or the sane man an idiot ? 
It may, perhaps, be argued that domestic animals have 
been so profoundly modified by contact with man, that they 
may thus have to some extent acquired the gift of language. 
I reply that, making full allowance for such modification, 
these animals must either have possessed the rudiments of 
a faculty for language or not. If they had when in a state 
of nature even the slightest germ of such a faculty, then 
absence of language cannot serve to distinguish the lower 
animals from man. If they had no such germ, and if the 
faculty for language could be created by mere association 
with mankind, then assuredly it is a characteristic far too 
unimportant to serve as the basis of a classification. 
It is not, however, among domestic animals that the 
faculty of language appears most fully developed. Save 
among mankind, it appears in the greatest perfection among 
the social birds and inseéts—species which unite not merely 
in families, but in tribes and communities. To the ants I 
