FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 77 



to be tabulce rasce at first, as the Meynert sclieme would 

 have them ; and so far from their being educated by the 

 lower centres exclusively, they educate themselves.* 



We have already noticed the absence of reactions from 

 fear and hunger in the ordinary brainless frog. Schrader 

 gives a striking account of the instinctless condition of his 

 brainless pigeons, active as they were in the way of loco- 

 motion and voice. " The hemisphereless animal moves in a 

 world of bodies which . . . are all of equal value for him. . . . 

 He is, to use Goltz's apt expression, impersonal. . . . Every 

 object is for him only a space-occupying mass, he turns out 

 of his path for an ordinary pigeon no otherwise than for a 

 stone. He may try to climb over both. All authors agree 

 that they never found any difference, whether it was an in- 

 animate body, a cat, a dog, or a bird of prey which came in 

 their pigeon's way. The creature knows neither friends 

 nor enemies, in the thickest company it lives like a hermit. 

 The languishing cooing of the male awakens no more im- 

 pression than the rattling of the peas, or the call-whistle 

 which in the days before the injury used to make the birds 

 hasten to be fed. Quite as little as the earlier observers 

 have I seen hemisphereless she-birds answer the courting 

 of the male. A hemisphereless male will coo all day long 

 and show distinct signs of sexual excitement, but his activ- 

 ity is without any object, it is entirely indifierent to him 

 whether the she-bird be there or not. If one is placed near 

 him, he leaves her unnoticed. ... As the male pays no at- 

 tention to the female, so she pays none to her young. The 

 brood may follow the mother ceaselessly calling for food, 

 but they might as well ask it from a stone. . . . The hemi- 



* Munsterberg (Die Willenshaudluug, 1888, p. 134) challenges MeyncTl'-: 

 scheme in tolo. saying that wliilst we liave in our personal experiencn 

 plenty of examples of acts which were at first voluntary becoming second- 

 arily automatic and reflex, we have no conscious record of a single origi- 

 nally reflex act growing voluntary. — As far as conscious record is concerued, 

 we could not possibly have it even if the Meynert scheme were wLolly true, 

 for the education of the hemispheres which that scheirs postulates must 

 in the nature of things antedate recollectic i. Bvt it sotos to me that 

 Miinsterberg's rejection of the scheme may possibly be correct as regards 

 reflexes from the loioer centres. Everj'where in this depa.itme: t ol' psy- 

 chogenesis we are made to feel how ignorant wt, really ar^ 



