Mr. Grant Aliens Botanical Fables 15 



Now if all this be meant for sober fact, should it 

 not also be maintained that the arboreal race which 

 was happy enough to live in a climate where such fruits 

 hung on the trees all the year round, and in such pro- 

 fusion as to afford a staple article of food, should have 

 come to regard plum colour, or black and blue, as the 

 most becoming hue, and the most conducive to good 

 looks among their own kind ? And should not the 

 "mulberry-faced Dictator's" have been an enviable 

 complexion ? A still more pertinent question is whether 

 there be the slighest tittle of evidence to show that 

 there ever was a race so sustained, except the necessity 

 of supposing it in order to find an explanation for the 

 colour-sense. 



There is likewise a very curious piece of philosophy 

 introduced under the aegis of Mr. Herbert Spencer, 

 apropos of a donkey. 1 This much misunderstood 

 animal is in reality, we are told, quite an aristocrat 

 among brutes, "one of the final developments of one 

 of the most successful branches of the great progressive 

 ungulate tribe." Being so high up in the social scale, 

 he " really cannot well avoid being an extremely clever 

 brute." But his cleverness is limited by physical con- 

 ditions, and here comes in the latest addition to our 

 philosophy on this subject: "He is not so clever to be 

 sure as the higher monkeys and the elephants; for, as 

 Mr. Herbert Spencer has pointed out, the opposable 

 thumb and the highly mobile trunk with its tactile 

 appendage give these creatures an exceptional chance 

 of grasping an object all round, and so of thoroughly 

 learning its physical properties, which ' has put them 

 intellectually in the very front rank of the animal 

 world." 



Here we have a prime example of the fatal facility 

 with which theories may be invented and presented for 

 acceptance, theories which the most ordinary obser- 

 vation should serve to discredit. We are asked to 

 believe that the power of " grasping an object all round " 



1 Vignettes, p. 197. 



