Not only is he capable, on proper instigation, of all the acts already
mentioned, but he guides himself by sight, so that if an obstacle be set
up between him and the light, and he be forced to move forward, he
either jumps over it or swerves to one side. He manifests the sexual
instinct at the proper seasons, and discriminates between male and
female individuals of his own species. He is, in short, so similar in
every respect to a normal frog that it would take a person very familiar
with these animals to suspect anything wrong or wanting about him; but
even then such a person would soon remark the almost entire absence of
spontaneous motion--that is, motion unprovoked by any present incitation
of sense. The continued movements of swimming, performed by the creature
in the water, seem to be the fatal result of the contact of that fluid
with its skin. They cease when a stick, for example, touches his hands.
This is a sensible irritant towards which the feet are automatically
drawn by reflex action, and on which the animal remains sitting. He
manifests no hunger, and will suffer a fly to crawl over his nose
unsnapped at. Fear, too, seems to have deserted him. In a word, he is an
extremely complex machine whose actions, so far as they go, tend to
self-preservation; but still a _machine_, in this sense--that it seems
to contain no incalculable element. By applying the right sensory
stimulus to him we are almost as certain of getting a fixed response as
an organist is of hearing a certain tone when he pulls out a certain
stop.
_But now if to the lower centres we add the cerebral hemispheres_, or
if, in other words, we make an intact animal the subject of our
observations, all this is changed. In addition to the previous responses
to present incitements of sense, our frog now goes through long and
complex acts of locomotion _spontaneously_, or as if moved by what in
ourselves we should call an idea. His reactions to outward stimuli vary
their form, too. Instead of making simple defensive movements with his
hind-legs, like a headless frog, if touched; or of giving one or two
leaps and then sitting still like a hemisphereless one, he makes
persistent and varied efforts of escape, as if, not the mere contact of
the physiologist's hand, but the notion of danger suggested by it were
now his spur. Led by the feeling of hunger, too, he goes in search of
insects, fish, or smaller frogs, and varies his procedure with each
species of victim. The physiologist cannot by manipulating him elicit
croaking, crawling up a board, swimming or stopping, at will. His
conduct has become incalculable--we can no longer foretell it exactly.
Effort to escape is his dominant reaction, but he _may_ do anything
else, even swell up and become perfectly passive in our hands.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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