Survival of the Fittest. 455 
reason to suspect that they love novelty for its own sake. 
Self-consciousness, individuality, abstraction, general ideas, 
etc., which have been held by several recent writers as mak- 
ing the sole and complete distinction between man and the 
brutes, seem useless subjects for discussion, since hardly any 
two authors agree in their definitions of these high faculties. 
In man, such faculties could not have been fully developed 
until his mental powers had advanced to a high state of per- 
fection, and this implies the use of a highly-developed lan- 
guage. No one supposes that one of the lower animals 
reflects whence he comes or whither he goes, or what is 
death or what is life, but can one feel sure that an old dog 
with an excellent memory, and some power of imagination 
as shown by his dreams, never reflects on his past pleasures 
in the chase? And this would be a form of self-conscious- 
ness. On the contrary, as Biichner ably remarks, how little 
can the hard-worked wife of an Australian savage who 
scarcely uses any abstract words and whose ability to count 
does not extend beyond four, exert her self-consciousness, or 
reflect on the origin, nature and aim of her own existence. 
That animals retain their mental individuality is unquestioned, 
for when any voice awakens a train of old associations in 
the mind of some favorite dog, as in the case of my dog 
Frisky, already referred to, he must have retained his mental 
individuality, although every atom of his brain had probably 
undergone change more than once during the five or six 
years he lived in my famiiy. Animals have some ideas of 
numbers. The crow has been known to count as far as the 
number six, and a dog I once had knew as well as I did 
when Saturday came. The sense of beauty, which has 
been declared peculiar to man, is innate in birds. Certain 
bright colors and certain sounds, when in harmony, excite in 
them pleasure as they doin man. The taste for the beauti- 
ful, at least so far as female beauty is concerned, is not of a 
special nature in the human mind, for it differs widely in the 
different races of man, and is not quite the same even in the 
