ORDER PACHYDERMATA. 381 



perly speaking, to their food. Our reason revolts so strongly 

 against the mere idea of feeding on an animal body, or 

 even of inflicting pain, which we are capable of feeling so 

 acutely ourselves, that there seems to be no principle short 

 of the uncontrollable fiat of instinct, which can reconcile us 

 to such actions. It really, therefore, is difficult to point 

 out satisfactorily any pure instinctive act in the adult Ele- 

 phant, more than in the human race. 



Seeking for the mamma of its mother, which the young 

 Elephant, in common with all lactiferous animals does in- 

 stinctively, and the spontaneous use of. the organs bestowed 

 upon it by nature, as the proboscis and the tusks, are actions 

 of a kind common to all young animals. When adult, a 

 discrimination in the choice of its food, with reference 

 rather to its quality than its flavour, a parental fondness 

 for its young, a dread of bodily harm, and perhaps a 

 consciousness of man's superiority, are instincts probably 

 as strong as any the animal evinces ; but that it is also ac- 

 tuated by a spontaneous motive^that in indifferent affairs it 

 is governed, not by an arbitary impulse, but by. a free, 

 reasonable choice, seems apparent by the anecdotes of the 

 animal already related. 



But before we take leave of the subject, at least for the 

 present, it may be necessary to add a final sentence in vin- 

 dication of man's only real superiority on earth from any 

 presumed depreciation the foregoing remarks may be 

 thought to countenance. Reason, that paradoxical gift be- 

 stowed upon him, at once the source of almost all his misery, 

 and yet without which his mere vegetative existence could 

 hardly be considered a boon, must not be treated too lightly on 

 the one hand, or proudly and exclusively appropriated on the 

 other. Reason in the brute mind appears to us like a seed in 

 an ungrateful soil: it makes an effort to vegetate, it com- 

 mences the operation, but circumstances arrest its progress 

 and render fructuation impossible; while the same seed, in 

 Vol. TH. 2 D 



