278 Wild Beasts 



edly transmitted. Here was a creature developed through 

 immemorial generations into a typical state of body and 

 mind. So far as the result is concerned, it does not make 

 the least difference whether this end was attained in the 

 manner pointed out by Darwin, or Galton, or Weismann. 

 In Gato the whole personality, every faculty and feeling, 

 the functional and structural peculiarities of all his tissues 

 and tissue elements, were stamped with that impress which 

 the entire life of his savage ancestry entailed. On what 

 grounds can it be supposed that such perfectly superficial 

 influences, as were brought to bear upon him while under 

 restraint, produce any radical change ? The alteration in 

 demeanor manifested towards one person, and probably 

 effected through that self-interest which, in its general 

 aspect, is exhibited by all the higher animals, did not show 

 that he had been, so to speak, inoculated with civilized 

 sentiments. On the contrary, he gave a flat denial to that 

 opinion every day, and was as essentially a puma, pure and 

 simple, at the hour of his death, as if he had never seen a 

 man. 



It would, however, be a singular course of reasoning by 

 which the inference that all pumas were the same was 

 drawn from this statement. Besides the congenital varia- 

 tion that, to conceal our ignorance, we say is involved in 

 the plasticity of life, every organism has certain acquired 

 differences. Life is no more than a state dependent upon 

 continuous adjustments, and it can never exist in an iden- 

 tical degree in separate beings, because neither the con- 

 'ditions themselves, nor the power to fit body or mind to 

 circumstances, is ever the same in different individuals. 



