certainly do consult; the orchard oriole, for example, building its nest shallow or deep, according as it is placed among firm and stiff branches, or suspended from the slender wind-swayed twigs of the weeping-willow[33]. The fact that birds build in human habitations, and make use of human manufactures, is a proof that they are capable of choice both as to locality and materials. The often-observed circumstance, that animals in a newly-discovered country are without fear of man,--a fear which they speedily acquire from experience of his mischievous propensities,--is a clear proof that they are capable of learning caution. It cannot be pretended that a caution which thus only comes in conjunction with experience is instinctive, or anything else than the result of observation, and therefore a sign of intelligent judgment. The lower animals, then, can learn prudence; can profit by experience. In the training of domesticated animals, the same motives of pleasure and pain are applied, and applied effectually, as are used in the education of human beings by parents and schoolmasters and lawgivers. This could not be if the groundwork of the moral nature were not the same in man and the lower animals. Addison was inclined to hold the old opinion, that ‘God himself is the soul of brutes,’ _Deus est anima brutorum._ ‘One would wonder,’ he says, ‘to hear sceptical men disputing for the reason of animals, and telling us it is only our pride and prejudices that will not allow them the use of that faculty[34].’ And yet his charming essays upon the natural history of animals, in which he took so keen a personal pleasure, with very little alteration, might be read as arguments in defence of the opinion he thus condemns. He remarks that birds, which ordinarily drive away their young as soon as they are able to get their own livelihood, nevertheless continue to feed them if they are tied to the nest, or confined within a cage, or by any other means appear to be out of a condition of supplying their own necessities. He observes, that the brood-hen will leave her eggs longer in summer than in winter, because in summer they will cool less speedily. But apart from the ingenuity necessary for the propagation of the species, he considers the same bird to be a very idiot, without the least glimmering of thought or common sense, mistaking a piece of chalk for an egg, and sitting upon it as though it were one, insensible of an increase or diminution in the number of those she lays, not distinguishing between her own and those of another species; and when the birth appears of never so different a bird, cherishing it for her own.