10 INTRODUCTION. 



possession of reason; and yet there is not in it the 

 slightest trace of reasoning, or the effect of any thing 

 but the circumstances of the moment. The escape, 

 was not the result of any desire to escape from slavery, 

 but a momentary aversion to the tiger's track. When 

 the forest was entered, the driver and the master were 

 forgotten, and the elephant was again a denizen of the 

 wild. The entrance of the keddah never suggested 

 the idea that the keddah had formerly been the gate to 

 bondage ; and even the passage, the bars, the nooses, 

 the tying, the drawing out, and the picketting, did 

 not awaken one particle of memory. But when the 

 word of command was given, down knelt the animal, 

 and was docile. There is, therefore, no trace of con- 

 nexion between its acts ; and the obedience to the old 

 hunter had no more approximation to reason in it than 

 the terror and flight at the smell of the tiger. An oak 

 that has expanded its buds about the same day of the 

 spring, and shaken off its leaves about the same period 

 of the winter, regularly, year after year, for a century, 

 has much stronger claims to reason, that is to be 

 governed in its present actions by the experience of 

 the past, than can be advanced by almost any animal ; 

 and yet we never heard of an oak keeping a calendar 

 of the months, or trying the temperature by a ther- 

 mometer of its own construction and contrivance. 

 But the oak obeys the simple law of vegetable life: 

 when the season and the temperature are in a state fit 

 for stimulating its fibres and juices, the sap circulates, 

 and the leaves expand; and when the circumstances 

 that are required for the action of the tree cease, the 



