MAN AND THE INFERIOR ANIMALS. 
G27 
on various occasions to be guided by a degree of sagacity not 
derivable from experience, and apparently implying a fore- 
knowledge of events, which neither experience nor reflection 
could have led them to anticipate. We cannot sufficiently 
admire the provident care displayed by nature in the preserva- 
tion both of the individual and of the species, which she has 
entrusted, not to the slow and uncertain calculations of prudence, 
but to innate faculties, prompting, by an unerring impulse, to 
the performance of the actions required for those ends. We see 
animals providing against the approach of winter, the effects of 
which they have never experienced, and employing various 
means of defence against enemies they have never seen. The 
parent consults the welfare of the offspring she is destined never 
to behold ; and the young discovers and pursues without a guide 
that species of food which is best adapted to its nature. All 
these unexplained, and perhaps inexplicable, facts, we must con- 
tent ourselves with classing under the head of instinct ; a name 
which is, in fact, but the expression of our ignorance of the 
nature of that agency of which we cannot but admire the ulti- 
mate effects, while we search in vain for the efficient cause. 
“In all the inferior orders of the animal creation, where instincts 
are multiplied while the indications of intellect are feeble, the 
organ which performs the office of the brain is comparatively 
small. The sensitive existence of these animals appears to be 
circumscribed within the perceptions of the moment, and their 
voluntary actions have reference chiefly to objects which are 
present to the sense. In proportion as the intellectual faculties 
of animals are multiplied, and embrace a wider sphere, additional 
magnitude and complication of structure are given to the ner- 
vous substance which is the organ of those faculties. The 
greater the power of combining ideas, and of retaining them in 
the memory, the greater do we find the development of the 
cerebral hemispheres. These parts of the brain are compara- 
tively small in fishes, reptiles, and the greater number of birds ; 
but in the mammalia they are expanded in a degree nearly pro- 
portional to the extent of memory, sagacity, and docility. In 
man, in whom all the faculties of sense and intellect are so har- 
