NATURE 



469 



THURSDAY, OCTOBER 10, 1S72 



HOUZEAU ON THE FACULTIES OF ^rAN 

 AND ANIMALS 



Eludes sur I's FacuUcs Mcutah-s dcs Aiuinaux comtian'ts 

 A ccllcs dc I'Hoinmc. Par J. C. Houzeau, Membre de 

 1' Academic de Belgique. 2 vols. pp. 1,008. (Paris : 

 Hachette, 1S72. London: Williams and Norgate.) 



IF this work had appeared a few years ago it would 

 have created for its author a considerable reputation. 

 Even now, had it been written in Europe after a careful 

 study of all the best authorities on the subject, it might 

 have been made a very v.aluable and important treatise. 

 But its author tells us — and the fact is clearly rellccted 

 in its pages — that it has been mainly written during a resi- 

 dence in the less cultivated parts of America, without the 

 maans of consulting the more recent works on the various 

 subjects of which it treats. It is true that M. Houzeau is 

 a close and acute observer of the habits of animals, and 

 he has furnished us with many curious and original 

 facts ; but his own observations and experiments are so 

 overlaid by vast masses of less trustworthy and often 

 irrelevant matter, and are so widely scattered owing to 

 his elaborate classification and minute sub-division of the 

 subject, that they lose much of their force and impressivc- 

 ness. 



For a work written under the circumstances here stated, 

 it is far too large and too pretentious. It aims at an 

 exhaustive treatment of the whole series of the actions 

 and passions of animals and of man, as illustratir\g their 

 comparative mental nature. It treats in detail of each 

 sense, each habit, each instinct, each custom, passion, and 

 idea ; and it discusses so fully the phenomena of language 

 and society that the title should have been reversed, it 

 being really a study of the mental faculties of Man as 

 compared with those of Animals. 



The subject of inquiry, as stated by the author, is, 

 " whether the mental faculties of man, of which our 

 arts, sciences, and social state arc the product, have not 

 their germs in the lower animals ; whether the several 

 partsof our intellectual and moral nature do not insensibly 

 and successively appear in the series of the animal king- 

 dom." He assures us that he approached this inquiry with 

 no preconceived ideas ; but we may be permitted to doubt 

 this when we find him bringing in such forced resem- 

 blances, as the rolling of pachyderms in mud with the 

 practice of tattooing (vol. i. p. 343), that of ruminants 

 rubbing off their hair to the shaving of men (i. p. 348), 

 and the existence of neuter insects with the custom of 

 castration (i. 351). These and many other similar cases 

 show a determination to find some point of comparison of 

 animals with man, which diminishes the effect of the 

 numerous real and very curious resemblances he has un- 

 doubtedly brought forward. In his chapter on the 

 question, whether the power of animals to find their way 

 for gre.at distances depends on a special sense, our author 

 conies to a conclusion which, although we believe it to be 

 a sound one, is opposed to the facts which he adduces. He 

 believes, for instance, that pigeons traverse an unknown 

 country in a direct line, and that dogs and otiier animals 



VUI,. VI. 



find their way, in cases where neither sight nor smell 

 could guide them. But he shows by many minute obser- 

 vations that animals, in ordinary cases, find their way by 

 means of the same faculties which man employs to find 

 his way, and hence he concludes that they do so in all 

 cases. But this by no meanS explains the more extraor- 

 dinary facts he has first adduced. Here we have an 

 example of his deficiency of information. He quotes the 

 case of the pigeons used during the siege of Paris, and 

 evidently believes that all that was done was to t.ake a 

 carrier-pigeon from any part of France to Paris, when, 

 on being let loose, the bird would infallibly return straight 

 to its former abode. He apparently knows nothing of 

 the fact that these birds must all be trained by means of 

 wider and wider flights over the very country they are to 

 traverse ; .and that without this precaution, a pigeon, taken 

 by a circuitous route from Brussels or from Bordeaux to 

 Paris, would no more find its way back to those places 

 than would a deaf and dumb man under the same 

 conditions. 



In the chapter on the "instinct to use clothing," we have 

 another example of our author's want of rigid impartiality. 

 He endeavours to show that some animals use clothing, 

 and that some men do not, and that it is, therefore, no 

 distinctive character of man. His examples of dressed 

 animals are hermit crabs and the larva; oi Pkryi^anea and 

 'liiiea; and although he adduces instances of unclothed 

 men, he has in no way accounted for that sense of shame 

 which he maintains is not innate, and which yet has, 

 even more than the necessity for warmth, led to the prac- 

 tice of clothing among so many peoples. 



In the section on the Sentiments and Passions, we have 

 an elaborate account of the wars, massacres, and cruelties, 

 tortures and human sacrifices, among the various races 

 of men, and we find the characteristic remark, that " the 

 touching custom of preserving a loved one's hair is, per- 

 haps, only a transformation of the old practice of scalp- 

 ing." We commend this notion to Mr. Tylor, as the ne 

 plus ullra of survival of savage practices in our modern 

 civilisation. We have also a condensed account of the 

 tortures inflicted on their prisoners by the North American 

 Indians, which can hardly be surpassed for terrible de- 

 scriptive power ; but there is no attempt to find parallels 

 to these essentially human attributes among the lower 

 animals. 



Although our author has devoted many pages to a dis- 

 cussion of the principles on which evidence is to be 

 admitted, and has laid down some excellent rules on this 

 subject, he appears to pay little regard to them in his 

 own work. He asserts, for instance, without any reserva- 

 tion, that " a large number of species of apes have a laugh 

 altogether analogous to ours ;" but the only evidence he 

 gives of the fact is that " Turks compare Europeans to 

 apes, because they laugh like them ;" the grin of anger 

 being here confounded with the laugh of appreciative wit. 

 In like manner he accepts as an undoubted fact the ex- 

 istence of people to whom the use of lire was wholly 

 unknown, although the two cases he gives — the Guanches 

 of Tenerilfe, and the Marianne Islanders — are highly sus- 

 picious, and have both been shown by Mr. Tylor (in his 

 " Early History of Mankind," a book quoted by M. 

 Houzeau) to be contradicted by many facts, and to rest 

 on no sufficient authority. 



