MENTAL. CONSTITUTION OF ANIMALS. 170 



humbler mammal, the carnaria not excepted. The pea- 

 cock strutted, the turkey blustered, and the cock fought 

 for victory, just as human beings afterwards did, and still 

 do. Our faculty of imitation, on which so much of our 

 amusement depends, was exercised by the mocking-bird ; 

 and the whole tribe of monkeys must have walked about 

 the pre-human world, playing off those tricks in which 

 we see the comicality and mischief-making of our char- 

 acter so curiously exaggerated. 



The unity and simplicity which characterize nature 

 give great antecedent probability to what observation 

 seems about to establish, that, as the brain of the verte- 

 brata generally is just an advanced condition of a partic- 

 ular ganglion in the mollusca and Crustacea, so are the 

 brains of the higher and more intelligent mammalia 

 only further developments of the brains of the inferior 

 orders of the same class. Or, to the same purpose, it 

 may be said that each species has certain superior de- 

 velopments, according to its needs, while others are in 

 a rudimental or repressed state. This will more clearly 

 appear after some inquiry has been made into the various 

 powers comprehended under the term mind. 



One of the first and simplest functions of mind is to 

 give consciousness — consciousness of our identity and of 

 our existence. This, apparently, is independent of the 

 senses, which are simply media, and, as Locke has shown, 

 the only media through which ideas respecting the 

 external world reach the brain. The access of such 

 ideas to the brain is the act to which the metaphysicians 

 have given the name of perception. Gall, however, has 

 shown, by induction from a vast number of actual cases, 

 that there is a part of the brain devoted to perception, 

 and that even this is subdivided into portions which are 

 respectively dedicated to the reception of different sets of 

 ideas, as those of form, size, color, weight, objects in their 

 totality, events in their progress or occurrence, time, mu- 

 sical sounds, &c. . The system of mind invented by this 

 philosopher — the only one founded upon nature, or which 

 even pretends to or admits of that necessary basis — 

 shows a portion of the brain acting as a faculty of comic 

 ideas, another of imitation, another of wonder, one for 

 discriminating or observing differences, and another in 

 which resides the power of tracing effects to causes. 

 There are also parts of the brain for the sentimental part 



