4 BRUTES. 



which is not thus gifted certainly deserves not the name of 

 animal. 6 



Notwithstanding the vast interval which of necessity exists 

 between the animal and vegetable kingdoms, the lowest brutes 

 approach as nearly as possible in organisation, and consequently 

 in function, to vegetable simplicity. They possess merely con- 

 sciousness and perception, and volition, with the appetite for 

 food, or are even nourished by imbibition, and multiply by shoots, 

 fixed like vegetables to the spot which they inhabit. The five 

 senses, sexual appetite, instincts, memory, judgment f , and loco- 



* I cannot conceive an animal without consciousness, perception, and volition ; 

 nor can I conceive these in an animal without a brain, any more than the secre- 

 tion of bile without a liver, or something analogous. I contend not for the name, 

 but for the thing. Zoologists indeed affirm that many internal worms and all 

 the class of zoophytes have no nervous system. But comparative anatomy is yet 

 imperfect, the examination of minute parts is extremely difficult, and new organs 

 are daily discovered. Blumenbach, after remarking that, except those animals 

 which inhabit corals and the proper zoophytes, most genera of the other orders of 

 the Linnaean class of vermes are found to possess a distinct nervous system, adds: 

 " although former anatomists have expressly declared in several instances that no 

 such parts existed." (Comparative Anatomy, ch. cxvi. F.) Besides, some beings 

 have been denominated animals without any very satisfactory reason. 



Where the nervous system of an animal cannot be readily detected, its presence 

 inay be inferred from motions evidently voluntary, such as retraction upon the 

 approach of footsteps, proving the existence of an organ of hearing, a brain, 

 and nerves : motion in a part directly stimulated, as the contraction of an hydatid 

 upon being punctured, is no proof of an animal nature, for this is common to 

 vegetables, for instance, the leaves of the diontea muscipula, which contract forc- 

 ibly on a slight irritation. It may likewise be inferred from the presence of a 

 stomach, because, where there is a stomach, the food is taken in, not by absorbing 

 vessels constantly plunged in it, but by a more or less complicated and generally 

 solitary opening regulated by volition. John Hunter contended that the stomach 

 was the grand characteristic of the animal kingdom. 



f I see daily instances of something deserving some such name as judgment 

 or reason in brutes. To the incredulous I offer the following anecdote in the 

 words of Dr. Darwin. " A wasp on a gravel walk had caught a fly nearly as 

 large as itself. Kneeling on the ground, I observed him separate the tail and 

 the head from the body part to which the wings were attached. He then took the 

 body part in his paws and rose about two feet from the ground with it; but a 

 gentle breeze wafting the wings of the fly turned him round in the air and he 

 settled again with his prey upon the gravel. I then distinctly observed him cut 

 off with his mouth first one of the wings and then the other, after which he flew 

 away with it unmolested with the wind." Zoonomia: Instinct. The works of 

 the two Hubers, Sur les Abeilles and Sur les Mceun des Fourmis indigenes, furnish 



