1 6 THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN REASON. 



of man and brute is marked by an obvious and con- 

 spicuous interval, constitutes an d, priori argument in 

 favour of the existence of a difference of kind in the 

 second case, and not in the first. 



The third a priori argument of our author * is the 

 following one : it is an "undeniable psychological fact " 

 that the human mind, in its individual development, 

 " ascends through a scale of mental faculties which are 

 parallel with those that are permanently presented by 

 the psychological species of the animal kingdom." Here 

 Mr. Romanes relies upon his own views as expressed by 

 his initial diagram. According to that diagram, an 

 infant of a week old has the memory of a starfish ; at 

 twelve weeks it is comparable in intelligence with a 

 frog, but in a fortnight more has mounted to the 

 mental level of a lobster ; at five' months it can " com- 

 municate its ideas" as freely as a bee, and in three 

 months more understands words and pictures as well as 

 a bird. All this we regard as quite fanciful and base- 

 less, and really unsustained by any of the arguments 

 adduced either in his previous works or in the present one. 

 We shall, by-and-by, meet with f facts brought forward 

 by Mr. Romanes himself (with respect to his own and 

 other children) which abundantly prove that infants of 

 a few months old, give unmistakable evidence that they 

 possess a really intellectual nature and true abstract 

 ideas. 



Man is an animal,J and, therefore, he might be 



* P- 5- t See below, chaps, iv. and v. 



We cannot in this chapter afford space to consider at length 

 Mr. Romanes's assertions about animals ; but we may most briefly 

 advert to the entirely unsatisfactory nature of some of them. 



