president’s address. 
373 
plant, rejecting many until it found one with food qualities re- 
sembling those of the cabbage? To seek to secure the propaga- 
tion of its species might be properly attributed to what we called 
instinct, but the provision it made for the care of its children 
seemed to have in it something of reason. The mason wasp pro- 
vided for its young by enclosing in the cell in which it laid its 
eggs, a spider or spiders which it paralyzed, so that when the egg 
hatched the young grub would have its food. The insect ap- 
parently had accurate knowledge how to paralyze the spider 
without killing it, and a fair knowledge of the quantity of food 
for each grub. It seemed to have race knowledge as well cs 
individual knowledge and skill. The great philosopher, Descartes, 
taught that consciousness and thought are the prerogative of man 
alone, and there is a pretty general acceptance of his idea. He 
regarded the animal world — men excepted — as piere machines, 
whose acts were purely mechanical, and therefore uninfluenced 
in any way by thought. Yet bee-keepers will tell us that cur- 
rents of information at times appear to run through a bee-hive, 
and the swarming of the bees seems to be a thoroughly planned 
scheme. Experiments made by Lubbock with ants showed that 
they possessed centres of intelligence in their congregations. 
These were low forms of creation, and they did not appear to ap- 
prehend man as a special factor in creation. But higher animals 
did. The swarming of birds was a kind of tribal movement, 
somewhat after the nature of the movements of the early Indians, 
who in the early days followed their food; but the bird took note 
of man, and its effort to deceive him as to the location of its nest or 
the hiding place of its young was a reasoned appeal to the consci- 
ousness of man, for the bird not only undertook to deceive him, 
but, evidently, assumed that it was possible to deceive him. Taking 
a still higher class of animals, the dog, for example, we could 
easily find in many of these, if we examined carefully, not only 
race feeling, but individuality in a marked degree. A good and 
seemingly honest dog living in the country will carefully guard 
his master’s sheep, but at night will travel miles to a place where 
he knows of another flock, will murder a number of them and 
return to his home by early morning as meek-looking and as 
honest-appearing as though “ ’twere nothing he had done by 
