422 BRUTES. 



and multiply by shoots, fixed like vegetables to the sjx)t which 

 they inhabit. The five senses, sexual appetite, instincts, memory, 

 judgment,* and locomotive power, with the necessary organs, 

 are variously superadded, and endless varieties of organisation 

 constructed, so that air and water, the crust and the surface of 

 the earth, are all replenished with animals completely calculated 

 for their respective habitations, f 



* I see daily instances of something deserving some such name as judg- 

 ment or reason in brutes. To the incredulous I offer the following anecdote in 

 the words of Dr. Darwin. " A wasp on a gravel walk had caught a fly nearly 

 as large as itself. Kneeling on the ground, I observed him separate the 

 tail and the head from the body part to which the wings were attached. 

 He then took the body part in his paws and rose about two feet from the 

 ground with it ; but a gentle breeze wafting the wings of the fly turned him 

 round in the air and he settled again with his prey upon the gravel. I then 

 distinctly observed him cut off with his mouth first one of the wings and then 

 the other, after which he flew away with it unmolested with the wind." 

 Zoonomia : Instinct. — The works of the two Hubers Sur les abeilles and Sur les 

 tnanirs desfourmis indigenes furnish an abundance of most interesting instances 

 of reason in those insects. 



t An error has been committed not only in representing the gradation regu- 

 lar, but in supposing every species of animal to constitute a distinct step in 

 the gradation. " The whole chasm in nature," says Addison, [Spectator. 

 No. 519,) " from a plant to a man, is filled up with divers kinds of creatures, 

 rising one above another, by such a gentle ami easy ascent, that the little tran- 

 sitions and deviations from one species to another arc almost insensible." 

 " All quite down from us," says Locke, (Essay on the Human Understanding. 

 B. HI. c. 6.) " the descent is by easy steps, and a continued series of things, 

 that in each remove differ very little one from the other. There are fishes that 

 have wings, and are not strangers to the airy region j and there are some birds, 

 that are inhabitants of the water ; whose blood is cold as fishes, and their flesh 

 so like in taste that the scrupulous arc- allowed them on fish days. There are 

 animals so near of kin both to birds and beasts, that they are in the middle 

 between both : amphibious animals link the terrestrial and aquatic together, 

 seals live at land and at sea, and porpoises have the warm blood and entrails 

 of a hog; not to mention what is confidently reported of mermaids or 

 sea-men." " In respect of our intellectwd and moral principles," remarks 

 Mr. Dugald Stewart, (Outlines of Moral Philosophy, par. 109.) " our nature 

 does not admit of comparison with that of any other inhabitant of this'globc : 



