TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION D. — DEPT. OF ZOOLOGY AND BOTANY. 361 



everything, except thought and reflection' .... 'they have sensations, hut no 

 faculty of comparing them one with another, that is to say, they have not the 

 power which produces ideas.' He is full of scorn * for that gratuitous admiration 

 for the moral and intellectual faculties of bees, which Sir John Lubbock's excel- 

 lent observations and experiments have shown to be indeed gratuitous. Speaking 

 of the ape, most man-like (and so man-like) as to brain, he says : 2 'II ne pense 

 pas : y a-t-il une preuve plus 6vidente que la matiere seide, quoique parfaitement 

 organise'e, ne peut produire ni la pensee, ni la parole qui en est le signe, a nioins 

 qu'elle ne soit animee par un principe superieur ? ' 3 Buffon has been accused of 

 vacillation with respect to his doctrines concerning animal variation, but no one 

 has accused him of vacillation with respect to his views concerning reason and 

 instinct. 



I come now to the passage which I said has been so strangely misunderstood. 

 It is that in which he expresses his conviction that ' animals have no knowledge of 

 the past, no idea of time, and consequently no memory.' But to quote this 

 passage without explanation is gravely to misrepresent the illustrious French 

 naturalist. Buffon was far from ignoring, indeed he distinctly enumerates the 

 various obtrusive phenomena which often lead the vulgar to attribute, without 

 qualification, both knowledge and memory to brutes. But, in fact, he distinguishes 

 between 4 memory and memory. His words are : ' Si l'on a donn^ quelque 

 attention a, ce que je viens de dire, on aura deja senti que je distingue deux 

 especes de memoire infiniment differentes l'une de l'autre par leur cause, et qui 

 peuvent cependant se ressembler en quelque sorte par leurs effets; la premiere 

 est la trace de nos idees, et la seconde, que j'appellerais volontiers reminiscence 5 

 plutot que memoire, n'est que le renouvellement de nos sensations,' and he declares^ 6 

 true memory to consist in the recurrence of ideas as distinguished from revived 

 sensuous imaginations. 



This distinction is one which it is easy to perceive. That we have automatic 

 memory, such as animals have, is obvious ; but the presence of intellectual memory 

 (or memory proper) may be made evident by the act of searching our minds (so to 

 speak) for something which we know we have fully remembered before, and thus 

 intellectually remember to have known, though we cannot now bring it before our 

 imagination. 



As with memory, so with other of our mental powers, we may, I think, distinguish 

 between a higher and a lower faculty of each ; between our higher, self-conscious, 

 reflective mental acts — the acts of our intellectual faculty— and those of our merely 

 sensitive power. This distinction (to which I have elsewhere 7 called attention) I 

 believe to he one of the most fundamental of all the distinctions of biology, and 

 to be one the apprehension of which is a necessary preliminary to a successful 

 investigation of animal psychology. It is, of course, impossible for us thoroughly 

 to comprehend the minds of dogs or birds, because we cannot enter into the actual 

 experience of such animals, but by understanding the distinction between our own 

 higher and lower faculties, 8 we may, I think, more or less approximate to such 

 a comprehension. 



1 Op. tit. tome iv. p. 91. 2 Op. tit. tome xiv. p. Gl. 



3 Mr. Butler cites objections brought forward in a certain passage (from pp. 

 30 & 31, vol. xiv.), as if they were Buffon's own. But they are the objections of an 

 imagined opponent whose views Buffon himself combats. It is worthy of note that 

 Buffon long anticipated our contemporaries with respect to man's place in nature 

 in so far as concerns his mere anatomy. For he did not hesitate to affirm that 

 the Orang differs less from us structurally than it differs from some other apes. 



4 Op. tit. tome iv. p. 60. 



5 Here he follows, without citing, the old distinction of Aristotle between 

 memory and reminiscence. 



6 Op. tit. tome iv. p. 56. 



' Lessons from Nature, Murray, 1876, p. 196. 



•• 8 Certain writers (as, for example, Professor Ewald Hering, of Prague) have 

 used the word 'memory' to denote what should properly be called 'organic habit,' 

 i.e. the power and tendency which living beings have to perpetuate, in the future, 



