CHAPTER VII 



Friendship in Animals 



Some lordly-minded person has said that it is a misuse 

 or an abuse of the word to describe as friendship the 

 distinct preference for each other's company and 

 habitual consorting together of two individuals among 

 the lower animals ; because — this wise man continues 

 — being lower animals, they cannot rise to the height 

 of that union between two minds, or souls, common 

 among men. Where then does the capacity for this 

 union begin ? for who will venture to say that the 

 two-legged upright or man-shaped mammalian of 

 Tierra del Fuego or the Andaman Islands or of the 

 Aruwhimi forest, is capable of a feeling beyond the 

 power of elephants, dogs, seals, apes, and in fact of all 

 other vertebrates — beasts, birds, reptiles, and fishes ? 

 There is no broad line of demarcation between our 

 noble selves and these our poor relations — even the 

 wearers of feathers and scales. We have had to learn, 

 not without reluctance and a secret bitterness, that 

 even our best and highest qualities have their small 

 beginnings in these lowlier beings. That union or 

 feeling of preference and attachment of an individual 

 towards another of its own or of a different species, 



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