2 Preface. 
by men and women who have been well informed and who have made 
themselves fully capable of contemplating understandingly the world 
which lies about them. 
Our libraries are to-day quite affluent in books that are the handmaids 
of natural science. Michelet and Hugh Miller, in their day, opened 
glorious new worlds before a rising generation, and that generation is 
now doing excellent work under the inspiration of the impetus which 
it then received. Tait, Balfour Stewart, Dawson, Gray, McCook, 
Thompson, Scudder, Mrs. Treat, Olive Thorne Miller and others have 
done much to continue the interest, pleasure and enthusiasm awakened 
by those earlier writers, and even Darwin and Huxley themselves, in 
detailing their experiments, have not scorned to bring their thoughts 
within the range of narrower minds. 
But in the popularization of natural science no man has done more 
than Rev. J. G. Wood in his numerous works. Not only have his 
writings created in thousands a taste for nature-studies, but they have 
been no less the means of cultivating the observation, awakening 
enthusiasm and directing effort in the lines of original research and 
discovery. Certainly no one, as his many writings so abundantly attest, 
possessed a larger fund of knowledge concerning the powers and 
capabilities of the lower animals than this author. Few knew our 
domestic animals better than he, and none was more capable of judging 
of the mental and moral s¢a/us which they should occupy in the world 
of animals. It is true that men and women, eminent in theology, 
literature and science, had expressed a belief in the idea that the “latent 
, 
powers and capacities’’ of the lower animals might be developed in a 
future life, but no one had felt secure enough in this belief to warrant 
more than a passing thought or two upon the subject. 
Bishop Butler, in his “ Analogy of Religion,’’ undoubtedly believed 
the lower animals capable of a future life. In speaking of them in 
this connection in the opening of his work, he says: ‘‘It is said these 
observations are equally applicable to brutes; and it is thought an 
insuperable difficulty that they should be immortal, and by consequence 
capable of everlasting happiness. And this manner of expression is 
both invidious and weak ; but the thing intended by it is really no diffi- 
culty a‘ all, either in the way of natural or moral consideration.” 
