578 MEMORY ; ITS INFLUENCE AND IMPORTANCE 
faculty, as evidenced in certain of their actions, has, tacitly at least, 
been hitherto altogether denied, though, as I am disposed to think, 
quite erroneously. In a word, as a source or principle of action, 
both in vertebrated and invertebrated animals, the influence of 
memory, directly or indirectly, through processes of comparison 
and combination, has been hitherto either wholly overlooked, or 
only casually and incidentally adverted to in explanation; and 
by no one, so far as I am acquainted, has the question received 
that degree of attention which its importance most undoubtedly 
demands. 
The different sources, or principles of action in animals, we have 
just now indicated, and it will be seen that they naturally divide 
themselves into instinctive and non-ins tinctive. Of the latter, it 
has equally been observed, that memory is either the sole spring 
or agent, or the chief and indispensable actuating power, or rather 
element of those composite principles and feelings which constitute 
the source of numberless and infinitely varied actions, habitual or 
incidental, in many different genera and tribes of the lower orders 
of creation. 
It may be as well, then, briefly to advert, in the commencement, 
to those actions which are the result, not of memory per se, but of 
cental or intellectual processes necessarily involving an exercise of 
this faculty in some degree, and they may not inappropriately be 
viewed here under the general head of 
ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE. 
That there are many different species of the lower orders which 
habitually will and perform many actions that are admirably suited 
to the attainment of certain ends, — and these often remote and 
obscure, and known to us only by repeated observation, or ex- 
perience and reflection, and reasoning on the inductive principle, — 
is a proposition the correctness of which there are few, now-a-days, 
who would be disposed seriously to call in question. And as 
actions of this kind can never, with any pretensions to common 
accuracy, be considered as at all pertaining to the power either of 
instinct or of memory per se, — far less, certainly, to mental feeling 
or emotion, — they have, very correctly, been referred to processes 
of intellectual action or rationality ; implying equally an exercise 
of these essential powers or elements of reason — comparison and 
combination , and memory or recollection of previously experienced 
sensations, or acquired perceptions. 
It was, as is well known, the opinion of both Descartes and 
Buffon, that animals are nothing more than automata — mere pieces 
of artificial mechanism, insensible equally to pleasure and to pain, 
