It has long been a mooted question if the progress of knowledge can be promoted by arbitrary encouragement, such as prize offers and sinecures, but the preponderance of logic seems on the side of those who hold that science should be left to its normal rewards, and that the proper sphere of legislation does not extend beyond the duty of securing the full benefit of those rewards by the removal of absurd disabilities and unfair discriminations in support of worm-eaten dogmas. Reason may be safely left to fight its own battle, if the arms of Un-reason cease to be strengthened by statutes which enable every village ghost-monger to silence the exponents of science by an appeal to medieval heretic-laws. CHAPTER VII. INDEPENDENCE. A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT. If the scale of precedence in the mental development of our fellow-creatures can be determined by any single test, that test is the instinctive love of Independence. Many of the lower animals may surprise us by constructive achievements that rival the products of human science, but their instinct of freedom is quite imperfectly developed. The caterpillar of the silk-moth will spin its satin winter-gown in a box full of mulberry leaves as skilfully as in the freedom of the tropical forests. In the hive of their captor a swarm of wild bees will continue to build hexagons and store up honey as diligently as in the rocks or hollow trees of the wilderness. Captive river-fish will eat and pair a day after their transfer to a fishpond. Birds, on the other hand, mourn their lost liberty for weeks. During the first half-month of its captivity, a caged hawk rarely accepts any food; sea-birds and eagles starve with a persistence as if they were thus trying to end an affliction from which they see no other way of escape. Wild cows can be domesticated in a month; wild elephants hardly in a year. Several species of the larger carnivora can be trained only if caught in their cub-hood, as in after years they become almost wholly untamable. The lower varieties of quadrumana, the Brazilian capuchin monkeys and East Indian macaques, seem almost to invite capture by the frequency of their visits to the neighborhood of human dwellings, while the apes proper are, without any exception, the shyest creatures of the virgin woods. The gorilla is so rarely seen in the vicinity of human settlements that its very existence was long considered doubtful. Sir Stamford Raffles asserts that at the distant sound of an ax the orang of Sumatra at once abandons its favorite haunts in the coast jungles. On the west coast of Borneo a large orang was once surprised by the crew of an English trading-vessel, but fought with a desperation that obliged its would-be captors to riddle it with rifle-balls, though they knew that a living specimen of that size would be worth its weight in silver.