MEETINGS OF SOCIETIES. 2"5 



Any of us who lived in the country would occasionally have 

 instances analogous to those cited by Professor Romanes brought under 

 notice, possibly supplementary or correcting them. A few had come 

 under his own. He cited instances of hunted kangaroos making for 

 water as it was then able to drown the dogs ; of horses on property at 

 Wanstead in Hawkes Bay, during the drought felling cabbage trees ; of 

 wild dogs feeding their pups by gorging themselves with flesh, then 

 vomiting it out on arrival at home ; and of dog slipping his collar, with 

 his modus operandi described. 



He alluded to Bain's view of the ' ; link of feeling and action," set 

 forth in the " Emotions and the Will." It was that a young child or 

 animal escaped a painful sensation or attained a pleasurable one in the 

 first instance purely by chance. Its spontaneous activity prompted it 

 to innumei'able movements in all directions. Some such movements 

 were attended with relief from pain or augmented pleasures, and only 

 after many repetitions perhaps came under the control of selective 

 volition. It was a case of " firing innumerable shots to hit one bird." 

 Had we not in these early manifestations of reason in ourselves an 

 analogy to the operation of reason in the living universe 1 ? Nature tries 

 innumerable variations before the one useful variation is hit on and 

 survives. We ourselves had all done the same. Might we not then 

 ■catch a glimpse, behind the apparently fortuitous processes of nature, of 

 the operations of a mind analogous to our own. 



Sir James Hector said the author had succeeded in making a very 

 abstract and difficult point in philosophy quite interesting. He agreed 

 with the side he took in the much discussed question of whether animal 

 intelligence differed from our own in kind or only in degree, and 

 whether the production of the highest intellect was the result of 

 progressive and accumulated development. The story of the horses 

 gnawing down the cabbage trees to obtain moistm - e is parallel with the 

 well known habit of the mules in Mexico kicking the great cactus trees 

 for the same purpose. 



Mr. Hulke remarked that the reasoning of animals differed from 

 that of man only in degree ; he mentioned several facts relating to 

 insects and animals to illustrate what he meant. 



Mr. Hudson gave an account of experiments made by Sir J. 

 Lubbock with ants, which appeared to indicate that insects when placed 

 out of their ordinary sphere of action exhibited very limited reasoning 

 powers. 



Mr. R. C. Harding said that the vulgar discrimination between 

 instinct and reason might not be so unscientific as some of the speakers 

 had assumed. It appeared to him to be based on a difference which 

 was not one of degree. Instinct be regarded as the intuitive perception 

 of interior qualities as distinguished from the merely exterior properties 

 made known to us by the five senses. The instincts might therefore be 

 taken as supplementary senses, on a different plane from the five 

 ordinarily recognised. Between the perception by means of a sense and 

 the intellectual result of rational effort there was an evident distinction, 

 and a parallel distinction could bft traced between instinct and reason. 



