Have any of those who have spent the summer in the country amused themselves by watching some one animal as it was busy with life’s cares? I hope so; and while so doing, was the creature credited with intelligence or blind instinct? I trust with the former. But “Stay!” shouts the critic, “do you realize the danger of loose interpretation?” How are we to decide whether or not an animal thinks as we do? Hereon hinges the whole matter. Obviously, it can never be demonstrated with what may be called mathematical certainty; but the average, unbiased observer will admit that when a creature acts under given circumstances precisely as he would do, that the brain directing those movements is essentially such a brain as his own. To prove that it is something else is left with those who deny the position that I take. Animals think; they are not mere machines; this position is as rational as to claim it of some of the lowest existing races of mankind, for the claim is laid upon the same class of occurrences. To wander abroad, whether in the forest or on the plain, and not to look upon animate creation as endowed with intelligence—of course, of varying degrees—is to go, not as an observer in the true sense, but as one deaf and blind. To ramble with this conviction, one will not misread the book of nature, and so be guilty of a literary crime if he gives his story to the world. An Open Winter. I have heard or read that one may experience a sense of weariness when surrounded by the best that Nature has to offer—a cloying with too many sweets, as it were. It seems hard to believe, so rejoiced is the average rambler at the return of spring, but that it is true has recently dawned upon me, here in the wilds of Jersey, after some six weeks of merely nominal winter.