76 The Descent of Man. Vak^ \ 



catch the other fishes, that he was sometimes completelj 

 stunned. The pike went on thus for three months, but at las* 

 learnt caution, and ceased to do so. The plate of glass was then 

 removed, but the pike would not attack these particular fishes, 

 though he would devour others which were afterwards intro- 

 duced ; so strongly was the idea of a violent shock associated 

 in his feeble mind with the attempt on his former neighbours. 

 If a savage, who had never seen a large plate-glass window, 

 were to dash himself even once against it, he would for a long 

 time afterwards associate a shock with a window-frame; but 

 very differently from the pike, he would probably reflect on the 

 nature of the impediment, and be cautious under analogous 

 circumstances. Now with monkeys, as we shall presently see, a 

 painful or merely a disagreeable impression, from an action once 

 performed, is sometimes sufficient to prevent the animal from 

 repeating it. If we attribute this difference between the monkey 

 and the pike solely to the association of ideas being so much 

 stronger and more persistent in the one than the other, though 

 the pike often received much the more severe injury, can we 

 maintain in the case of man that a similar difference implies the 

 possession of a fundamentally different mind ? 



Honzeau relates'* that, whilst crossing a wide and arid plain 

 in Texas, his two dogs suffered greatly from thirst, and that 

 between thirty and forty times they rushed down the hollows 

 to search for water. These hollows were not valleys, and there 

 were no trees in them, or any other difference in the vegetation, 

 and as they were absolutely dry there could have been no 

 smell of damp earth. The dogs behaved as if they knew that 

 a dip in the ground offered them the best chance of finding 

 water, and Houzeau has often witnessed the same behaviour in 

 other animals. 



I have seen, as I daresay have others, that when a small 

 object is thrown on the ground beyond the reach of one of the 

 elephants in the Zoological Gardens, he blows through his trunk 

 on the ground beyond the object, so that the current reflected 

 on all sides may drive the object within his reach. Again a well- 

 known ethnologist, Mr. "Westropp, informs me that he observed in 

 Vienna a bear deliberately making with his paw a current in 

 some water, which was close to the bars of his cage, so as to 

 draw a piece of floating bread within his reach. These actions of 

 the elephant and boar can hardly be attributed to instinct or 

 inherited habit, as they would be of little use to an animal in a 

 state of nature. Now, what is the difference between sueh 



^* ' FacTiU^s Mpnules des Animaux,* 1872, torn. ii. p. 265. 



