Survival of the Fittest. 45 5 



reason to suspect that they love novelty for its own sake. 

 Self-consciousness, individuality, abstraction, general ideas, 

 etc., which have been held by several recent writers as mak- 

 ing the sole and complete distinction between man and the 

 brutes, seem useless subjects for discussion, since hardly any 

 two authors agree in their definitions of these high faculties. 

 In man, such faculties could not have been fully developed 

 until his mental powers had advanced to a high state of per- 

 fection, and this implies the use of a highly-developed lan- 

 guage. No one supposes that one of the lower animals 

 reflects whence he comes or whither he goes, or what is 

 death or what is life, but can one feel sure that an old dog 

 with an excellent memory, and some power of imagination 

 .as shown by his dreams, never reflects on his past pleasures 

 in the chase ? And this would be a form of self-conscious- 

 ness. On the contrary, as Buchner ably remarks, how little 

 can the hard-worked wife of an Australian savage who 

 scarcely uses any abstract words and whose ability to count 

 does not extend beyond foftr, exert her self-consciousness, or 

 reflect on the origin, nature and aim of her own existence. 

 That animals retain their mental individuality is unquestioned, 

 for when any voice awakens a train of old associations in 

 the mind of some favorite dog, as in the case of my dog 

 Frisky, already referred to, he must have retained his mental 

 individuality, although every atom of his brain had probably 

 undergone change more than once during the five or six 

 years he lived in my famiiy. Animals have some ideas of 

 numbers. The crow has been known to count as far as the 

 number six, and a dog I once had knew as well as I did 

 when Saturday came. The sense of beauty, which has 

 been declared peculiar to man, is innate in birds. Certain 

 bright colors and certain sounds, when in harmony, excite in 

 them pleasure as they do in man. The taste for the beauti- 

 ful, at least so far as female beauty is concerned, is not of a 

 special nature in the human mind, for it differs widely in the 

 different races of man, and is not quite the same even in the 



