26 ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE. 
several trivial, yet critical, phases, it suddenly appears as a 
delicate, exquisitely graceful winged creature, endowed with 
magnificent power of flight, which it puts to immediate use 
without the preliminary of a trial trip. It baffles our sense 
of purpose to understand why all the tedious and ignoble 
years of preparation should not be the preface to prolonged 
exercise of perfected faculties. The pathetic truth is that 
the Mayfly seldom survives a second or third sunrise after 
becoming a perfect insect. Flight, love, reproduction, and 
death—all are enacted within the space of a few hours. The 
surface of the water will be thickly strewn with the wreckage 
of the pretty creatures that rose from its depths but yester- 
day; for eleven months to come it may be that not a single 
Mayfly will dance in the glade that was so lately dim with a 
mist of them. 
Seeing, then, how irregular is the period that elapses 
between the birth of animals and their attaining control of 
the motor faculties, it may be understood that similar uncer- 
tainty must surround the question how soon the brain, or its 
equivalent in the lowest grades, supplies any creature with 
consciousness or intelligence. From the precocity of in- 
stinctive activities, such as was exhibited by Mr Hudson’s 
young jacana, there may be inferred a corresponding for- 
wardness in the birth of intelligence, because animals which 
are soonest thrown upon their own resources must be 
readiest to exercise their wits or disappear from the scene 
of life. 
The growth of the organ of intelligence may be assumed 
to be spontaneous and its powers and functions congenital ; 
but it does not seem certain, as is popularly supposed, that 
the cardinal difference between the mental powers of man 
and those of the lower animals is that the first are capable 
of indefinite range, whereas the second are stationary within 
fixed limits. It is possible sometimes to note a forward 
movement in the intelligence of individuals very low in the 
organic scale, with corresponding effect upon the habits of 
the race. Perhaps in no creatures are the habits and actions 
more rigidly stereotyped than they are in bees; yet the 
