Reason and Instinct, 



t)0S5 



posts ; others fly from the neighbourhood of everything which might 

 render a locality eligible as a residence, and in consequence liable to 

 be visited by a party of possible enemies or marauders; others again 

 hide singly, so closely that nothing but cunning equal to their own 

 can detect their hiding-place, and even it is often baffled ; and others 

 yet adopt the most wonderful devices to mislead or evade pursuit. 

 Their keen apprehension and almost intuitive perception of lurking 

 danger too, is absolutely astonishing. A leaf or twig bruised or set 

 awry, the displacement of a pebble or a few grains of sand, the almost 

 indiscernible flattening or crushing of a blade of grass or dry lichen 

 on a hard rock, a thin column of ascending smoke, the merest tatter 

 of a torn article of raiment, are in an instant observed, scrutinized 

 and made to give up copious information, where to the unremarking, 

 unacuminated eye of the civilized man there would be no more sug- 

 gestive material than in the filthy wares of the rag-merchant or 

 the torn fragment of a copy-book from some village boy's kite's- 

 tail. 



Now% in all this it is impossible not to be struck with the analogy — 

 much less modified than might have been expected, by the vastly 

 higher intellectual organization possessed by the savage man as com- 

 pared with even the highest brute — between the avoidance of danger 

 by the uncivilized man and by the other animals of creation. An 

 analogy, indeed, so striking, that we are not so much justified 

 in calling it instinctive as compelled so to call it. For the purpose 

 of showing this analogy more conspicuously, I will not repeat again 

 instances of brute caution and stratagem already often repeated, but 

 will select one or two observations recorded by Dr. Livingstone, 

 which forcibly arrested my attention in the perusal of his absorbing 

 narrative. "It is curious," he says, "to observe the intelligence of 

 the game : in districts where they are much annoyed by firearms, 

 they keep out on the most open spots of country they can find 

 in order to have a widely extended range of vision, and a man armed 

 is carefully shunned. From the frequency with which I have been 

 allowed to approach nearer without than with a gun, I believe they 

 know the difl'erence between safety and danger in the two cases. 

 But here, where they are killed by the arrows of the Balonda, they 

 select for safety the densest forest, where the arrow^ cannot be easily 

 shot : * * * * and on several occasions I have observed there 

 was no sunshine to cause them to seek for shade." — (' Livingstone's 

 Missionary Travels,' p. 280). Again, " Ants surely are wiser than 

 some men, for they learn by experience. They have established 



