AND AMERICAN RURAL SPORTS. 
149 
my story of my friend H. D. ? the best of all men, although 
not the best of fishermen, who was out with me on the same 
stream, and near the same place, one time when I caught 
twenty dozens, and he two fish less than one dozen; that 
wondering what had become of him, I sat down on the 
bank to wait for him, and at length saw him coming to- 
wards me, very slowly, walking in the middle of the 
stream, his spectacles — near-sighted — enabling him to 
choose the deepest parts of it, his line rolled round his rod, 
and his rod on his shoulder. He would have passed with- 
out seeing me, and when I said, “ Why H., what are you 
about? Are you tired of fishing?” “Oh, no!” he re- 
plied, “not at all — I am delighted with it: but this is the 
best part of it. I don’t care about the Trout: you can catch 
enough for both of us.” 
Do you remember another story I told you, of another 
person, who accompanied me to catch Trout ? After miss- 
ing him for a long time, I heard him call at the full extent 
of his lungs, “I have caught one! I have caught one!!” — 
and looking up the stream, I saw him holding his rod out in 
triumph, with something dangling at the end of his line. 
Observing my attention, he cried, “ What shall I do with 
it? Shall I kill it before I take it off?” And when, in his 
exultation, he came down to me with it, holding his rod at 
arm’s length before him, I found his captive to be a misera- 
ble chub , about as long as his finger! A Dr. Battius of a 
fish! — Plague on Dr. Bat! having spoken of him, I can’t 
get rid of the vagabond. You know we never caught chub 
— never suffered them to bite. 
Do you remember what a supper we made on Trout, that 
night, at our bivouac ? What exquisite sauce our day’s 
fishing had provided for us? How delightfully our cook 
dressed the fish? How many you eat? — we always chose 
the small ones, not more than six or seven inches long — 
How thirsty you were when you awoke, sometime after 
midnight, from your bed of fragrant boughs? How horror- 
struck, when, half-dead with thirst, you found that there 
was no water in the tent? How your impatience would 
not let you wait until our cook could be roused to bring 
water from the spring ? How you went yourself, in the 
dark, over logs and through bushes, down to the stream? 
And how you kept me awake the rest of the night, with 
your groans of tribulation and repentance at having drank so 
much cold water? And do you also remember, that, after- 
wards, during your rambles in Europe, when visiting the 
classic ground of Petrarch, you wrote to me that much as 
the Trout of Vaucluse were famed, you could say — for you 
had just had one for your dinner — that they were not to be 
compared, by a thousand degrees, to the Trout of Silver 
Lake? 
And there you are, in Philadelphia, you who can recol- 
lect all this, plodding away at your profession! Well, I 
Pp 
won’t check you. Go on, and prosper! Only consider it 
your duty, during the warm weather of every year, to come 
up to our hills, and taking a little « idle time not idly 
spent,” lay in a stock of health by breathing our pure air, 
and bathing in our clear streams. R. H. R. 
AN INQUIRY RESPECTING THE TRUE 
NATURE OF INSTINCT. 
(Concluded from page 101.) 
If brutes then are incapable of viewing moral qualities 
objectively, and reflecting upon them as such, they must ne- 
cessarily be destitute of that perception of moral differ- 
ences, with which the power of exercising their moral saga- 
city must be connected ; moral sagacity, therefore, cannot 
exist at all in them otherwise than apparently ; and this 
conclusion is exactly what a candid estimation of brute 
powers seems to lead to; namely, that they are actuated by 
moral energies of which they are not conscious, and which 
therefore are not properly theirs; and that these energies 
operating upon their proper conscious perceptions — which 
may be termed natural perceptions, to distinguish them 
from those which are moral and intellectual, — furnish 
the motive principles which serve to induce them to apply 
their conscious powers in a certain manner; — thus produc- 
ing what is apparently moral in them, without their being 
conscious that it is so, and which thus is really not so as to 
them. The seat of these moral energies within them, there- 
fore, appears to be a secret region in their minds, above 
the seat of their natural perceptions; the latter serving as a 
plane, as it were, for the operation of such superior powers, 
which, under the Divine control, dispose them to the fulfil- 
ment of the ends they are designed for. 
In this manner it is possible to account for those surpris- 
ing appearances of moral excellence in the actions of ani- 
mals, which we observe them to display, and which are so 
totally above their proper conscious powers: — a moral excel- 
lence, which, as we have seen, appears in many instances 
more perfect and undeviating than that of the generality of 
human agents, and which, therefore, cannot be the result of 
any conscious freedom in the creature, unless we suppose 
them, in particular instances, raised higher in moral per- 
ception and determination than even man himself. It is 
by confounding the limited freedom of brute action with 
the superior energies, which, unknown to them, actuate 
their conscious powers, that their nature has been so far mis- 
taken, as to be considered the same in kind with, and only 
differing in degree from, that of man. 
Herein then consists one proper limitation of the brute 
mind : — although apparently moral, it is in reality not so, but 
merely natural, and is operated upon by moral causes above 
