Book Notices. 493 



The Natuke ajN'd DEVELOPMEiSfT OF Atnimae Inteixigenxe : 

 —By Wesley Mills, M.A., M.D., D.V.S., F.R.S.C, Professor 

 of Physiology in McGill University, Montreal, Canada. 

 London, T. FiSihier Unwin, Paternoster Square, 1S98. 



Few men possess such eminent qualifications for dsaling 

 with the subject treated of in this volume as Dr. Wesley Mills 

 possesses. To begin with, he is well known as the friend and 

 protector of all animals. An ancient poet-philosopher took 

 credit to himself that he counted nothing relating to man 

 foreign to him. The range of Professor Mills' interest and 

 sympathies is vastly more comprehensive ; _it embraces every- 

 thing that lives. To him no bird or beast is an object of 

 indifference. And this is a prime qualification for one who 

 would interpret animal life. To understand them one trust 

 love them, as indeed love is the true organ of man's percep- 

 tion and his interpretation of the entire field of his observa- 

 tions. It is inconceivable that any one who is repelled by the 

 lower creatures, or to whom their welfare is a matter even 

 of indifference, could ever do them justice in any opinion he 

 formed of them. Longfellow ascribes the remarkable skill in 

 various kinds of woodcraft of his Indian hero, Hiawatha, to 

 the tenderness of his sympathies with the tenants of the 

 forest ; in consequence, they readily yielded up their secrets 

 to him. He "learned of every bird its language; where they 

 built their nests in summer; where they hid themselves in 

 winter." According to this law, animal nature must be an 

 open book to Dr. Wesley Mills. 



Then our author loves truth above all things. This disposi- 

 tion is manifest throughout the treatise before us. How 

 earnestly he plans, and how patiently he waits and works to 

 get at the truth. The scientific spirit is his pre-eminently. 

 Nothing is taken for granted, and no detail is deemed unim- 

 portant in his observations on the development of the 

 intelligence of the animals under study. In no portion of 

 this book is his love of truth more conspicuously shown than 

 in the correspondence regarding instinct, with which it closes. 

 Dr. Wesley Mills is well known to be an evolutionist in a 

 general way ; but he evidently prefers facts, and is prepared 

 to cling to them rather than to any hard and fast theory of 



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