86 THE DESCENT OF MAN. 



attribute this difference between the monkey and the pike 

 solely to the association of ideas being so much stronger 

 and more persistent in the one than the other, though the 

 pike often received much the more severe injury, can we 

 maintain in the case of man that a similar difference 

 implies the possession of a fundamentally different mind? 



Houzeau relates * that, while crossing a wide and arid 

 7 >lain in Texas, his two dogs suffered greatly from thirst, 

 and that between thirty and forty times they rushed down 

 the hollows to search for water. These hollows were not 

 valleys, and there were no trees in them, or any other differ- 

 ence in the vegetation, and, as they were absolutely dry, 

 there could have been no smell of damp earth. The dogs 

 behaved as if they knew that a dip in the ground offered 

 them the best chance of finding water, and Houzeau has 

 oftened witnessed the same behavior in other animals. 



I have seen, as I dare say have others, that when a small 

 object is thrown on the ground beyond the reach of one of 

 the elephants in the Zoological Gardens, he blows through 

 his trunk on the ground beyond the object, so that the cur- 

 rent reflected on all sides may drive the object within his 

 reach. Again, a well-known ethnologist, Mr. Westropp, 

 informs me that he observed in Vienna a bear deliberately 

 making with his paw a current in some water, which was 

 close to the bars of his cage, so as to draw a piece of float- 

 ing bread within his reach. These actions of the elephant 

 and bear can hardly be attributed to instinct or inherited 

 habit; as they would be of little use to an animal in a state 

 of nature. Now, what is the difference between such 

 actions, when performed by an uncultivated man, and by 

 one of the higher animals? 



The savage and the dog have often found water at a low 

 level, and the coincidence under such circumstances has 

 become associated in their minds. A cultivated man 

 would perhaps make some general proposition on the sub- 

 ject; but from all that we know of savages it is extremely 

 doubtful whether they would do so, and a dog certainly 

 would not. But a savage, as well as a dog, would search 

 In the same way, though frequently disappointed, and in 

 both it seems to be equally an act of reason, whether or not 

 any general proposition on the subject is consciously placed 



* Faculty Mentales des Animaux," 1873, torn. ii. p. 265 



