1846.] Characteristics of Animals. 239 



taneous, and independent of the will; that of man is perpetually 

 exercised in brino-ino; forward new combinations and trains of 

 thought. Unfledged birds remain passive in the nest till the mo- 

 ther's chirp falls on their ear, when they stretch their mouths 

 agape for the food she has brought. Brute memory too is bound- 

 ed by the narrow circle of the material and visible, beyond which 

 the human mind is perpetually sallying, to range abroad over the 

 interminable vistas of fancy, 



" In climes beyond the solar road." 



Another diversity is the educability of man. But for man, to 

 what would the education of the horse or the ox amount? The 

 improvement at best is rather shadowy than real, a partial ex- 

 pansion of instinct, rather than a transformation, as in the pointer 

 and the pacer. The mocking bird may indeed be incited to im- 

 itate songs foreign to its own, but the hen, with all her care- 

 ful looking after her eggs, is amused with an ovoid chalk-ball. 

 The rabbit burrows underneath a rock, as all generations of rab- 

 bits have done before, and the beaver of to-day erects his dam 

 upon the model of the Noachic epoch. The Canary bird is a 

 musician by birth; the child becomes such only after repetitious 

 efforts and tedious application. Is there no incongruity of con- 

 stitution here? 



Instinct may indeed along definite ranges seem almost to tran- 

 scend reason. The razorbill poises its egg with mechanical ac- 

 curacy upon a pointed rock. The duckling liberated from its 

 shell rushes for the muddy pool, diving and swimming with the 

 dexterity of the old brood, and to the consternation of its foster- 

 parent, the hen. The eagle pounces upon the hawk in a cycloidal 

 curve, the line of maximum regularity and velocity. The wasp 

 was a paper maker long before the primitive voyagers on the 

 Hoang-ho. The determination of the geometrical figure that in 

 its application should obviate all vacuity of space, to wit, the 

 sexagonal prism, and the ascertainment of the truth, that three 

 planes constituting a solid angle above form a roof of greatest 

 resistance — what costs the geometer hours of delineation and 



