NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION. 249 



much skill as to triumph over biped opponents, whining 

 if the adversary plays a wrong piece, or if they them- 

 selves be deficient in a right one. Of extensive com- 

 binations of thought we have no reason to believe that 

 any animal is capable — and yet most of us must feel the 

 force of Walter Scott's remark, that there was scarcely 

 anything which he would not believe of a dog. There 

 is a curious result of education in certain animals — 

 namely, that habits to which they have been trained in 

 some instances become hereditary. For example, the 

 accomplishment of pointing at. game, although a pure 

 result of education, appears in the young pups brought 

 up apart from their parents and kind. The peculiar leap 

 of the Irish horse, acquired in the course of traversing 

 a boggy country, is continued in the progeny brought up 

 in England. This hereditariness of specific habits sug- 

 gests a relation to that form of psychological demonstra- 

 tion usually called instinct ; but instinct is only another 

 term for mind, or is mind in a peculiar stage of develop- 

 ment ; and though the fact were otherwise, it could not 

 afiect the postulate, that demonstrations such as have 

 been enumerated are mainly intellectual demonstrations, 

 not to be distinguished as such from those of human 

 beings. 



More than this, the lower animals manifested mental 

 phenomena long before man existed. While as yet there 

 was no bi'ain capable of working out a mathematical 

 problem, the economy of the six-sided figure was 

 exemplified by the instinct of the bee. Ere human 

 musician had whistled or piped, the owl hooted in B flat, 

 the cuckoo had her song of a falling third, and the chirp 

 of the cricket was in B. The dog and the elephant 

 pre-figured the sagacity of the human mind, 'i'he love of 

 a human mother for her babe was anticipated by nearly 



