HIS ZOOLOGICAL RELATIONS. 55 



which they are manifested.* This inferiority of ia- 

 tellectual adaptation, which soon reaches its cUmax 

 in the lower animals, limits the unprovability in the 

 individual and prevents progression in the race j 

 whereas the superior adaptation of man secures, under 

 favourable conditions, at once the improvement of the 

 individual and the progress of the race. It is this 

 improvability, taken in its widest sense, that places 

 man in new relationships to nature — relationships 

 which involve at once the consciousness of right and 

 wrong and the idea of moral responsibility. Psycho- 

 logically this is all that can be fairly advanced, and 

 aU that in a natural-history point of view need be 

 contended for ; though we are aware that many 



* Of these opinions, wMch have been arrived at by a long and 

 intimate study of the conduct of the lower animals, we iind the fol- 

 lowing pointed ooiToboration in the Introduction to Agassiz' Con- 

 tributions to the Natural History of the United States : — " The in- 

 telligibility of the voice of animals to one another, and all their 

 actions connected with such calls, are also a strong argument of their 

 perceptive power, and of their ability to act spontaneously and with 

 logical sequence in accordance with these perceptions. There is a 

 vast field open for investigation in the relations between the voice 

 and the actions of animals, and a still more interesting subject of 

 inquiry in the relationship between the cycle of intonations which 

 different species of animals of the same family are capable of utter- 

 ing, which, so far as I have yet been able to trace them, stand to 

 one another in the same relations as the different, so called, families 

 of languages." 



