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The Chairman.— It is the difficulty of the paper before us, if I understand 
it rightly, that that amount of intelligence is not admitted. 
Captain Fishbourne. — I think the paper does admit it in the case of the 
parrot and the hut. 
Mr. Wain wright. — You see we cannot give distinctive names to these 
operations in the vovq of the bird. I take them to be nothing else than the 
operations of a certain spirit, if I may use the term, without, of course, 
meaning that immaterial and immortal spirit which we possess. I make 
very much of what was said by Professor MacDonald as to man being the 
only created being who has the power of making offensive and defensive 
weapons. That is a great point of difference between man and the lower 
animals. Then, again, man has the power of using spoken language: There 
has been a sort of attempt to place the cawing of a rook on a level with— 
what shall I say ? — the eloquence of Chatham : but surely there is a great 
difference in the sounds which issue from a rookery and the eloquence of the 
forum. If you say that animals have reason and language, you must grant 
them ideas suitable to their mental condition ; but you would hardly expect 
them to write histories and epics which should rival the works of Herodotus, 
Milton, and Homer. Mr. Morshead says that the Andaman Islanders, the 
Bushmen and Veddahs, have always a natural consciousness of the dis- 
tinction between good and evil, although their notions of what is good and 
what is evil may not coincide with ours. But I think there is a distinction 
between men and brutes which far transcends that in importance. Brutes 
have been taught to do the most unheard-of things, but there is one faculty 
which they have never yet been found to possess, and which is never wanting 
in man, however low or degraded he may be the brute has no capacity for 
veneration and worship. You may teach a dog to hold, its paws together, bow 
its head, and remain still for five minutes as if at its prayers ; but you 
never will succeed in eliciting any little fragment of conduct from it which 
shall so far impose on you as to make you think the dog has acquired the 
least atom of your idea of worship. If you say there are some exceptions 
among humanity, and that some races of people have been found who do not 
worship, then I say that those exceptions have never been authenticated, 
and I am not convinced. All men pay some sort of veneration and worship 
to the Supreme Being to whom worship is due : it may be blind, bloody, 
cruel, violent, as you like, but still it is a form of worship proceeding from 
the idea that there is a Power to whom they owe protection, and whom they 
must propitiate. But assuming for the moment that the Andaman Islanders 
have no knowledge of a God, I put it to you whether the fact that they have 
become so degraded as to be outside the pale of humanity does not establish 
my position, that the knowledge and worship of God not only belongs to the 
human race, but belongs peculiarly to them, and is not to be found among the 
lower animals ? Truly I think all research and inquiry go to prove that of 
man alone it can be said that there is a spirit in him, and the breath of the 
Almighty hath given him understanding. 
The Chairman.— I do not think Mr. Morshead’s paper has been so 
