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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



effect dependent upon the necessity of modi- 

 fying instincts. The higher an animal may 

 be in the scale of life, the author assumes, 

 the more varied become its relations to sur- 

 rounding things and the less suited to vary- 

 ing circumstances becomes a mechanical and 

 rigid instinct. If, however, there is a period 

 of youth during which inherited instincts 

 may be used merely as a vehicle for redun- 

 dant energy, an opportunity is afforded for 

 modification and alteration of the rigid sys- 

 tem. The instinct of a creature with prac- 

 tically no period of youth, as with insects, 

 must be complete and ready for use. The 

 mammal or bird, however, passes through a 

 period of youth " during which it has no im- 

 mediate duties to perform and is cared for 

 by its parents. In this time it plays with its 

 instincts, learns to fly or to run and jump, to 

 recognize its kind, to distinguish between the 

 palatable and unpalatable, to make and un- 

 derstand call notes or cries of alarm ; in a 

 thousand ways to suit each occasion with its 

 action and deserve a place in the hierarchy 

 of intelligent beings." The games and 

 sports earliest to appear in animals and most 

 universal are classed by Prof. Groos as those 

 of experiment and curiosity. " Young crea- 

 tures play with everything that attracts their 

 attention. They try their teeth or their 

 claws on every available object. They taste 

 and smell, rush and tumble about, collect in 

 heaps or scatter everything they are able to 

 reach, and, indeed, make attempts on the 

 unattainable. The greater the intelligence 

 of the adult animal the more surprisingly the 

 young animal treats its surroundings in the 

 spirit of an empirical philosopher. A young 

 monkey observed by a sister of the late 

 Prof. Romanes discovered for itself that the 

 handle of a hearth brush was screwed into 

 a socket. It succeeded in unscrewing the 

 handle with ease, and after long experiments 

 discovered that only one end twisted in a 

 particular direction would fit into the socket. 

 Another young monkey, chained just beyond 

 the reach of a fire, found out how to tear 

 strips from a newspaper and roll them up 

 into tapers sufficiently long to reach the 

 flames. By some such fertile employment 

 of curiosity the professor thinks that the an- 

 cestors of man may have gained their mas- 

 tery over fire." Skill in flying is attained by 

 considerable practice, and " in mammals the 



exercises of the young bear a definite rela- 

 tion to adult habit. Mountain-living crea- 

 tures, like kids and chamois, continually 

 practice standing jumps, springing vertically 

 into the air. . . . Gazelles, on the other hand, 

 which have to jump watercourses and gul- 

 lies on the Veldt, confine their youthful en- 

 thusiasm to practice of the running jump. 

 Similarly the play of tiger cubs with balls or 

 with the tail of their mother, and the wrest- 

 ling and mimic combats of other carnivo- 

 rous young, all exhibit an instinctive bias by 

 which the restless zeal of youth is disci- 

 plined for the real purposes of maturity." 



Seals and their Pnps. A fur seal has 

 none of the altruistic instincts of some other 

 animals, for it will never feed any pup but 

 her own. Not a very affectionate mother at 

 best, she yet unerringly knows her nursling's 

 voice, and he in turn learns to find tier. When 

 they meet and recognize each other at meal 

 time, it ia easy to see that they belong to- 

 gether. Her duty done, however, she lets it 

 shift for itself till the next feeding time. 

 She instantly knows any little hungry in- 

 truder that is stealing up to her to get a 

 meal on the sly. She cuffs and bites, until 

 the starveling, intimidated, slinks away to 

 die. These orphaned younglings are the 

 fruit of the indiscriminate "pelagic" seal- 

 ing. Their mother being killed, and they 

 unable to obtain another nurse, they perish 

 by the thousands. A United States report 

 estimates the number for 1896 at 20,331. 



The Last Resting Plaee of Pasteur. On 



December 26, 1896, the remains of Pasteur 

 were borne to their final resting place, a 

 crypt at the Pasteur Institute. On the stone 

 is inscribed a sentence from his reception 

 speech at the Academy : " Heureux celui qui 

 porte en soi un dieu, un ideal de beaute, et 

 qui lui obeit ideal de 1'art, ideal de la sci- 

 ence, ideal de la patrie, ideal des vertus de 

 1'evangile " (" Happy he who bears within 

 hhii a god, an ideal of beauty, and follows 

 it an ideal of art, an ideal of science, an 

 ideal of patriotism, an ideal of the Chris- 

 tian virtues "). Many men of science and 

 thinkers of note, both French and foreign, 

 were present, and deputations and wreaths 

 were sent by scientific societies. A service 

 at Notre Dame, where the remains had been 



