8 INTRODUCTION. 



owing to the chase and to his contact with man, learns to 

 an extraordinary extent, and thinks out particular tricks for 

 trapping game. According to Leroy, animals must have a 

 common tongue, however little we may understand of it ; it 

 is impossible that their various communications can be made 

 without speech, and they possess all that is supposed to be 

 necessary to speech, such as faculties of thought, com- 

 parison, judgment, decision, reflection, etc. Leroy had then 

 more accurate views about an animal-language than our great 

 language-investigator, Max Miiller, who calls speech the 

 Rubicon between men and animals which will never be 

 crossed.* 



That which must most interest and astonish us in Leroy, 

 however, who quite ignores instinct and refers everything to 

 reason, is that he has already grasped the power and signifi- 

 cance of the transmission of qualities acquired during life, 

 and that he makes the important and fruitful remark: "that 

 all that we regarded as mere blind mechanism in animals, 

 was perhaps the result of long-since acquired habits which 

 had been handed down from generation to generation." P. 

 Floureus ("De 1'Jnstinct et de 1'Intelligence des Apimaux, 

 5 ed., p. 41) calls the investigations of Leroy the deepest 

 which had until then been made into the intellectual capa- 

 bilities of animals. After Leroy, it was the great naturalist, 

 F. Cuvier, who, by means of observations made on a 

 young ourang-outang kept by him in captivity, was led to 

 declare that an animal was able " to combine various ideas 

 in its head and to draw a conclusion from them ; " and this 



* The voice organs of men and animals are similar in construction ; 

 there is neither anatomical nor physiological distinction between them. 

 Indeed, this organ in some animals, as in birds, possesses a flexibility 

 and an imitative power exceeding those of men. Animals communi- 

 cate with each other by means of tones and gestures, as do men ; in 

 both speech proceeds from imitation and hearing. Hence deaf people 

 are also stupid. If speech, as many philosophers maintain, were in- 

 nate in man, then men would speak even without hearing. The wild 

 amongst animals, and children growing up alone amongst men, do not 

 speak, but only utter cries, which are often almost the same in men 

 and animals, as for instance the cries of astonishment or of fear. Also 

 the language of primitive man has been much enriched by the imitation 

 of natural sounds, education through the ear (Onomatopoeia). Parrots 

 can be trained to talk just as children are. (See D. S. Wilks, in the 

 " Journal of Mental Science.") On the natural development or origin 

 of speech see further the author's " Man and his place in Nature." 



