solely to the association of ideas being so much stronger and more
persistent in the one than the other, though the pike often received
much the more severe injury, can we maintain in the case of man that a
similar difference implies the possession of a fundamentally different
mind?
Houzeau relates (24. Etudes sur les Facultes Mentales des Animaux,
1872, tom. ii. p. 265.) that, whilst crossing a wide and arid plain in
Texas, his two dogs suffered greatly from thirst, and that between
thirty and forty times they rushed down the hollows to search for
water. These hollows were not valleys, and there were no trees in them,
or any other difference in the vegetation, and as they were absolutely
dry there could have been no smell of damp earth. The dogs behaved as
if they knew that a dip in the ground offered them the best chance of
finding water, and Houzeau has often witnessed the same behaviour in
other animals.
I have seen, as I daresay have others, that when a small object is
thrown on the ground beyond the reach of one of the elephants in the
Zoological Gardens, he blows through his trunk on the ground beyond the
object, so that the current reflected on all sides may drive the object
within his reach. Again a well-known ethnologist, Mr. Westropp, informs
me that he observed in Vienna a bear deliberately making with his paw a
current in some water, which was close to the bars of his cage, so as
to draw a piece of floating bread within his reach. These actions of
the elephant and bear can hardly be attributed to instinct or inherited
habit, as they would be of little use to an animal in a state of
nature. Now, what is the difference between such actions, when
performed by an uncultivated man, and by one of the higher animals?
The savage and the dog have often found water at a low level, and the
coincidence under such circumstances has become associated in their
minds. A cultivated man would perhaps make some general proposition on
the subject; but from all that we know of savages it is extremely
doubtful whether they would do so, and a dog certainly would not. But a
savage, as well as a dog, would search in the same way, though
frequently disappointed; and in both it seems to be equally an act of
reason, whether or not any general proposition on the subject is
consciously placed before the mind. (25. Prof. Huxley has analysed with
admirable clearness the mental steps by which a man, as well as a dog,
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