56 MYTH AND SCIENCE. 



we have innumerable examples both among wild 

 and domestic animals ; but although suspicion and 

 anxiety are subdued by habit and experience, yet these 

 objects and phenomena are not thereby transformed 

 into pure and simple realities. In the same way, if 

 they are at first frightened by the sight and com- 

 panionship of some other species or object, habit 

 and experience gradually calm their fears and sus- 

 picions, and the association or neighbourhood may 

 even become agreeable to them. I have often ob- 

 served that different species, both when at liberty 

 and in confinement, are affected by the most lively 

 surprise and perturbation when some new pheno- 

 menon has startled them; they act as if it were 

 really a living and insidious subject, and then they 

 gradually become calm and quiet, and regard it as 

 some indifferent or beneficent power. 



I must adduce some observations and experiments 

 from the many I have made on this subject. It may 

 be objected that if animals in their spontaneous per- 

 ception personify the object in question, they would 

 give signs of this fact with respect to all the objects 

 with which they come in contact, and among which 

 they live, and yet they remain indifferent to many 

 of them, which is a proof that they distinguish the 

 animate from the inanimate. In fact it cannot be 

 disputed that a vast number of the phenomena and 

 objects of nature are regarded by animals with in- 

 difference ; they are perceived by them, but it does 



