54 TO Reason and Instinct. 



see beasts come short in" (Locke, ch. xi. § 11); unless, that is, we 

 are permitted to take the phrase "come short in" as meaning only 

 "are much inferior" (to man, namely), instead of, as the author most 

 certainly intends, "have no use of," or "are entirely without." 



if, then, it be conceded — as I think it will be by any candid and 

 unprejudiced thinker — that, to a certain extent, and under certain 

 limitations, a variety of animals do possess adequate and intelligible 

 means of intercommunication, not only is one chief ground for 

 denying to these brutes the power of " Abstraction, or making general 

 ideas" cut away, but a most conclusive argument for the actual 

 possession by them of that faculty mainly established ; and that, 

 altogether independently of the manifold and most striking evidences 

 of the existence and activity of the faculty, as illustrated in countless 

 actions of great numbers of various brutes. 



To proceed, then : to whatever extent we may have succeeded in 

 adducing satisfactory reasons for believing animals, or some of them, 

 to be possessed of the power or faculty of abstracting, — to be even 

 capable of carrying on a train, no matter how short, of abstract 

 reasoning; we have, to the same extent, made it unnecessary to go, 

 step by step, through the process of showing them to be endowed, in 

 no inconsiderable degree, with the faculty of comparing and com- 

 pounding their ideas; for most certainly, here, the less is included of 

 the greater: and, to say the least, it may be quite as interesting 

 instead to adduce a few additional facts in illustration of the workings 

 of brute intellect. "Though dogs often disagree and are jealous of 

 each other at home, they generally make common cause against a 

 stranger. Two of my dogs, who were such enemies and fought so 

 constantly, that I could not keep them in the same kennel, seemed to 

 have compared notes, and to have found out that they had both of 

 them been bullied by a large powerful watch-dog, belonging to a 

 farmer in the neighbourhood. They suspended their own hostilities 

 and formed an alliance, and then they together assaulted the common 

 enemy, and so well assisted each other, that, although he was far 

 stronger than both my dogs put together, he was so fairly beaten and 

 bullied that he never again annoyed them or me by rushing out upon 

 them as we passed by the place, as he had always been in the habit 

 of doing before he received his drubbing." (Tour in Suth. ii. 213.) 

 " I went one morning in July, before daybreak, to endeavour to shoot 

 a stag. * * Just after daylight 1 saw a large fox come very quietly 

 along the edge of the plantation in which I was concealed : he looked 

 with great care over the turf wall into the field, and seemed to long 



