MENTAL POWERS OF MAN AND LOWER ANIMALS. 179 



All animals feel wonder, and many exhibit curiosity. 

 They sometimes suffer from this latter quality, as when 

 the hunter plays antics and thus attracts them ; I have 

 witnessed this with deer, and so it is with the wary cha- 

 mois, and with some kinds of wild-ducks. Brehm gives 

 a curious account of the instinctive dread which his 

 monkeys exhibited for snakes ; but their curiosity was so 

 great that they could not desist from occasionally satiat- 

 ing their horror in a most human fashion, by lifting up 

 the lid of the box in which the snakes were kept. I was 

 so much surprised at his account, that I took a stuffed 

 and coiled-up snake into the monkey-house at the Zoo- 

 logical Gardens, and the excitement thus caused was one 

 of the most curious spectacles which I ever beheld. 



ALL ANIMALS POSSESS SOME POWER OF REASONING. 



„ ^, Of all the faculties of the human mind, 



it will, I presume, be admitted that reason 

 stands at the summit. Only a few persons now dispute 

 that animals possess some power of reasoning. Animals 

 may constantly be seen to pause, deliberate, and resolve. 

 It is a significant fact that the more the habits of any 

 particular animal are studied by a naturalist, the more 

 he attributes to reason and the less to unlearned instincts. 

 In' future chapters we shall see that some animals ex- 

 tremely low in the scale apparently display a certain 

 amount of reason. No doubt it is often difficult to dis- 

 tinguish between the power of reason and that of instinct. 

 For instance. Dr. Hayes, in his work on "The Open 

 Polar Sea," repeatedly remarks that his dogs, instead of 

 continuing to draw the sledges in a compact body, di- 

 verged and separated when they came to thin ice, so that 

 their weight might be more evenly distributed. This 



