276 
THE INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL 
may torture or destroy as caprice may suggest; but he who has 
looked around him with an observant eye—the veterinarian, 
whose duty as well as whose delight it has been to study the 
conformation and the character of inferior animals, both physical 
and moral, has seen enough to admire and to love, in those 
whose medical guardian and friend he has undertaken to be, and 
to make him regard with sovereign contempt the sneer of the by¬ 
stander, whether he be a learned man or a fool. 
The intellectual and moral qualities of the inferior animals is 
a subject highly interesting, but much mystified and misunder¬ 
stood—pushed, perhaps, to a somewhat ridiculous extent by the 
visionary—and too contumeliously dismissed by him who would 
monopolize to himself the care and benevolent regard of the great 
father of all. 
We have been accustomed, and properly, to regard the nervous 
system, or that portion of it which is connected with animal life, 
that which renders us conscious of surrounding objects, suscep¬ 
tible of pleasure and of pain—we regard this as the source of in¬ 
tellectual power, and moral feeling. All our knowledge is de¬ 
rived from our perception of things around us. A certain im¬ 
pression is made on the ultimate fibrils of a sensitive nerve. 
That impression, in some mysterious way, is conveyed to the 
common sensorium, the brain; and there it is received, regis¬ 
tered, stored, and compared—there its connexions are traced, 
and its consequences appreciated ; and thence result, and in pro¬ 
portion as a variety of impressions are conveyed and due use is 
made of them, intellectual power, and a sense of truth and 
duty. 
Then our subject, the intellectual and the moral feeling of brutes, 
or the mechanism on which these depend, is divided into two 
parts—the portion which receives and conveys, and that which 
stores up and compares and uses the impression. 
The portion which receives and conveys is far more developed 
in the brute than in the human subject. Whatever sense we 
take, we clearly perceive the triumph of animal power. The 
olfactory nerve in the horse, the dog, the ox, and the swine, 
the largest of all the cerebral nerves, has much greater compa- 
