566 CLASS AVES. • 



species. This is a point which the advocates for the identity 

 of animal intelligence with human can never get over. The 

 successive generations of brutes are indebted for nothing to 

 their predecessors ; the superintendance of man is indispensable 

 to their improvement ; but the case is quite different with him. 

 His moral existence is extended and embellished by the ac- 

 cumulated acquisitions of past and of contemporary ages. 

 He lives not isolatedly and individually — he co-exists by his 

 acquaintance, and his multiplied relations, with his entire 

 species. The generations of mankind do not pass away, and 

 be as though they had never been. Posterity is the inheritor 

 of the fruits of their labours ; to it their intellectual estates de- 

 scend, and, under favourable circumstances, are bequeathed to 

 remoter ages, cultivated, improved, and enlarged. The in- 

 struction of the species becomes that of the individual ; and 

 the tide of our moral existence, if we may so express ourselves, 

 is swelled by a myriad of tributary streams, whose sources are 

 hidden in the night of time, and the impenetrable recesses of 

 antiquity. 



One main cause of this moral perfection, or rather perfecti- 

 bility, is to be found in the long duration of the infancy of 

 man. The animal, yet scarcely endued with sufficient strength, 

 abandons his family. He either becomes a solitary individual, 

 or joins in flocks and herds where family relations are utterly 

 unknown, and there is no bond of union, but what spring 

 from the mere necessities of subsistence and procreation. 

 There are no moral ties to connect the communities of the 

 brute ; for though animals are often gregarious, they are never, 

 in the true sense of the word, social. But in the human 

 species, the wants, resulting from a long incapacity of living 

 solitarily, multiply the moral relations, and increase the intel- 

 lectual lights of every individual. 



Thus we find that the imitative powers of the parrot do 

 not, of themselves, entitle this bird to any marked supe- 



