1847,] Instinct and Reason, 31 



grieve for the loss of a favourite mohout, refusing the caresses of 

 a stranger, perhaps, and so the canary bird sometimes pines to 

 death after the separation of its mate, and a similar susceptibility 

 attaches to the orang outang. A story is told by Virey of a dog, 

 upon the Seine, that persisted in keeping upon the ice where his 

 master had been drowned, till the ice melted away and left him 

 to drown. Similar is the narration about a favorite named Uash, 

 the companion of , a famous English gamekeeper. 



Such are t"he correspondencies, suc-h the convergences between 

 man and the more intelligent of the quadrupeds. Are the lines 

 of demarcation indefinite and conventional, or original and intran- 

 scendentible? On this question analogies have been evoked out 

 of botany, chemistry, geology, and entomology, and with son:ie 

 plausibility on either side. Phrenology too has been summoned 

 to interpose a decision. The fundamental principle of this theory, 

 that the brain is multipartite in function, is a position in physiol- 

 ogy long since recognized. While the organic excitabilities re- 

 side in the ganglionic chain, and the instinctive in the spinal cord 

 with perhaps the cerebellum, the ratiocinative powers seem to 

 appertain exclusively to the brain. Beyond that much, phrenolo- 

 gy has hardly succeeded in making in advance by one decisive 

 step. 



Thus man in his retrogradative assimilations approximates to 

 the quadrumana and the quadrupeds generally; is he distinguished 

 above such in re, radically, specifically, or only in modo, that is, 

 in degree? 



Darwin and Lamarck speculated in this wise. The archetype 

 of the animal creation was an oyster, which during the revolution 

 of some plus or minus chiliads of years, proceeded onward through 

 the pachydermatous, and other vertebrate metamorphoses, till it 

 finally attained to the dignity of the troglodyte, the homo caudatus 

 or long tail. This luculent idea Monboddo advances to its culminat- 

 ing point, by transforming the long tail through the help of cau- 

 dal attrition into the homo curtatus or hoh tail. Seriously, when 

 a hypothesis neither hung upon one solitary fact, nor countenanced 

 by the resemblance even of an obscure and forced verisimilitude, 

 but distinguished solely for its crude and chimerical fantasies, is 

 gravely set forth as the nucleus of a theory, the dreamer of such 

 vagaries should have his requiescat written on a tumulus of 

 sand. 



The author of the Vestiges enters the arena — " caput altum in 

 proelia tollit " — with the well-burnished panoply of geological 

 armor. Here again is the doctrine of gradationary evolutions from 

 an archeaus or primaeval germ, in alleged correspondence with 

 the laws of the material universe. The conclusion, abhorent as 

 it is to faith, is none the less incongruous with analogy. Has this 



