250 VESTIGES OF THE 



every humbler inaiiiinal, the carnaiia not excepted. The 

 peacock .strutted, the turkey bkistered, and the cock 

 fought for victory, just as human beings afterwards did, 

 and still do. Our faculty of imitation, on which so much 

 of our amusement depends, was exercised by the mocking- 

 bird ; and the whole tribe of monkeys must have walked 

 about the pre-human world, playing off those tricks in 

 which wo see the comicality and mischief -making of our 

 character so curiously exaggerated. 



The unity and simplicity which characterise nature 

 give great antecedent probability to what observation 

 seems about to establish, that, as the brain of the 

 vetebrata generally is just an advanced condition of a 

 particular ganglion in the mollusca and Crustacea, so are 

 the brains of the higher and more intelHgent mammalia 

 only farther developments of the brains of the inferior 

 orders of the same class. Or, to the same purpose, it 

 may be said, that each species has certain superior 

 developments, according to its needs, while others are 

 in a rudimental or repressed state. This will more 

 clearly appear after some inquiry has been made into the 

 various powers comprehended under the term mind. 



One of the first and simplest functions of mind is to 

 give consciousness — consciousness of our identity and of 

 our existence. This, appai-ently, is independent of the 

 senses, which are simply media, and, as Locke has shown, 

 the only media, through which ideas respecting the ex- 

 ternal world reach the brain. The access of such ideas 

 to the brain is the act to which the metaphysicians 

 have given the name of perception. Oall, however, has 

 shown, by induction from a vast number of actual cases, 

 that there is a part of the brain devoted to perception, 

 and that even this is subdivided into portions which are 

 respectively dedicated to the reception of diffei-ent sets of 



