140 LIFE ON THE EARTH. 



child aptly represent those degrees of intelligence 

 which are the highest attainment of the creatures near- 

 est to us in the animal world. Some writers, as Lord 

 Herbert of Cherbury, have held that the capacity for 

 conceiving the existence of God forms the chief dis- 

 tinction between the reason of man and that of brutes. 

 But this may rather be taken as one of many analogous 

 cases, expressing the limit imposed on the faculties of 

 the latter. 



As respects the feelings, passions, and propensities 

 of the animals thus near to our confines, we must re- 

 gard them as essentially the same with those which 

 denote the moral nature of man very different, in- 

 deed, in their objects, and wanting those nicer shades 

 of the human character in its various grades of cultiva- 

 tion, but still to be described only by the same terms 

 and understood in the same sense. Without running into 

 subtle distinctions of name or nature, it is enough to 

 recite generally the common qualities most familiar to 

 observation. Such are, love and hatred, emulation and 

 jealousy, anger and revenge, boldness and fortitude, 

 pride, and perhaps vanity, gratitude, cowardice, and 

 cunning. These qualities are not defined by difference 

 of species only. As in man, they characterise indi- 

 viduals of the same race, and are innate, more or less, 

 in the temperament of each. 



It does not concern us here to trace them down- 

 wards in the scale of animal life till they vanish in the 

 bare instincts of existence. The main point is, that 

 such a scale exists, culminating in man, and in its 

 higher grades approaching to him in the kind, though 



