136 THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN REASON 



part of a talking bird. It concerns a cockatoo which 

 had been ill, and the words are : — 



" A friend came the same afternoon, and asked him 

 how he was. With his head on one side and one of his 

 cunning looks, he told her that he was ' a little better ; ' 

 and when she asked him if he had not been very ill, he 

 said, * Cockie better ; Cockie ever so much better.' . . . 

 When I came back (after a prolonged absence) he said, 

 ' Mother come back to little Cockie : mother come back 

 to little Cockie. Come and love me, and give me pretty 

 kiss. Nobody pity poor Cockie. The boy beat poor 

 Cockie.' He always told me if Jes scolded or beat him. 

 He always told me as soon as he saw me, and in such a 

 pitiful tone." 



After this we feel with Mr. Romanes that " enough 

 has now been said." For if what he represents as facts 

 and valid inferences were truly such, we should not say 

 with our author that " animals present the germ of the 

 sign-making faculty," but that animals plainly have and 

 exercise the very same intellectual powers that we 

 possess and exercise, and that nothing but a series of 

 accidents can have prevented some bird, such as this 

 Cockie, from having discovered the law of gravitation or 

 dictated a treatise like the ethics of Aristotle ! 



Mr. Romanes concludes the chapter we are examin- 

 ing as follows : " It is certain that .... no distinction 

 between the brute and the man can be raised on the ques- 

 tion of the kind of signs which they severally employ as 

 natural or conventional. This distinction, therefore, may in 

 future be disregarded, and natural and conventional signs, 

 if made intentionally as signs, I shall consider as identical!' 



