22 ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE. 
their babes exempted them from the necessity of foregoing 
social pleasures and from close attendance in the nursery. 
But the human mother has been careful to transmit the 
discovery to posterity. The enigma remains how successive 
generations of Megapodes are able to put the experience of 
their progenitors into practice, seeing that the mother birds 
not only evade the tedium of personal incubation, but entirely 
neglect the education, instruction, and nurture of their 
young; which, fortunately for ourselves, human mothers 
have not learnt to do. 
From the examples given above, chosen almost at ran- 
dom from thousands of others which present themselves to 
every observer of nature, some material may be gathered 
for an answer to the first question propounded above. It is 
an answer very far from authoritative, explicit, or final, 
consisting mainly of a summary of what is probable. It 
must consist, indeed, of no more than this,-that all animals 
arrive at birth endowed with congenital automatism co- 
ordinate with a specific inherited organic mechanism, ready 
to discharge certain functions without the intervention of 
conscious volition. But part of the inherited mechanism 
consists, at least in animals above the lowest grades, of an 
apparatus fitted to receive external impressions conveyed 
along the afferent or incoming nerve-currents, and to respond 
to them by transmitting energy along the efferent or out- 
going nerve-currents. In short, these animals are supplied 
with an intellectual and volitional equipment which, however 
long it may remain ineffective after birth, is capable of and 
destined for various ranges of energy and complexity, and 
differs only in degree and development from the human organ 
of intelligence. Animals may be judged as coming into the 
world as sentient but unconscious automata, but with mental 
machinery ready to respond in a greater or lesser measure 
to experience. 
