MAN'S ACCOUNT WITH THE LOWER ANIMALS 17 



Sometliing very similar to poison-gas was used by the skunk 

 thousands of years before the Germans ever employed it ! 



Salmon poachers are said to attract the fish by means of 

 lights exhibited at night. Exactly the same artifice is 

 practised by deep-sea fishes themselves with a view to enticing 

 smaller members of the finny tribe within the range of their 

 rapacious jaws — but in this case the hghts are developed as 

 parts of their own bodies, in the form of the so-called phos- 

 phorescent organs. In the Malay Archipelago the luminous 

 organs of certain fishes are said to be cut out by the natives 

 and actually used as bait. 



I will not weary you with further illustrations, but I may \ 

 point out that in this direction a vast field still remains to be 

 explored, and many useful lessons no doubt may still be learnt 

 by human inventors. The function of many organs met with 

 amongst various animals is still unknown to us and the study 

 of these may well lead to important developments in appKed 

 science. Just as mankind to-day exploits for practical pur- 

 poses the vast stores of energy laid up in the form of coal by^ 

 the living plants of past geological epochs, so we may also profit 

 by the no less valuable stores of experience accumulated by 

 the lower animals in the course of their evolution and revealed ' 

 to us not only in their bodily structure but also in what, for 

 want of a better term, we commonly call their instincts. 



But the animal kingdom must not be regarded merely as a 

 kind of technical school for the education of mankind on purely 

 utiHtarian lines. In spite of the gross materiahsm of the 

 present age some of us still rejoice in the possession of an 

 aesthetic faculty and recognise the existence of such a thing 

 as beauty. Some of us even venture to think that the highest 

 function of a university is to foster and develop the aesthetic 

 side of human nature and to cultivate knowledge of all kinds 

 for the sake of what it brings to us in the shape of piire 

 intellectual and aesthetic pleasure, apart altogether from the 

 sordid consideration of whether or not the value of such know- 

 ledge is capable of being expressed in terms of bread and butter, 

 or even of motor cars. 



