Family life is a product of memory, for the mate and offspring are _re_-cognised; therefore it always implies some degree of intelligence. The young are watched and protected, and taught by the higher animals. Opportunities are thus afforded of learning about the world, and more particularly of acquiring the traditions, the stored experiences, of the race. With the opportunity to profit by experience comes the ability to profit by it, and with the latter a gradual decay of instinct. Intelligence is substituted, more or less, for unthinking impulse. All the instincts are not lost, but in the higher animals we find no such elaborate innate impulses as in the lower. “Sitaris” is able to fend for herself from the first; but just in proportion as animals are highly placed in the scale of life, so they are helpless at the beginnings of consciousness, but correspondingly capable later. A young pig can run as soon as it is born, but the acquirements of the most learned pig are small compared to that of a dog, which, though more helpless than the pig at birth, is so teachable that he becomes the companion of man. Our domestic animals are all teachable, otherwise we could not tame them. Of living beings man is by far the most helpless at birth. He cannot even seek the breast. In him instinct is at its minimum. For him more than any other animal prolonged and elaborate tuition is necessary; but so vast is his memory, and so great his power of utilising its stored experience, that in later life he is beyond comparison the most capable of the inhabitants of the earth. Compare what even a dull man knows, including the words of a language and its inflections and articulations, with what is acquired by the cleverest dog, and the immensity of the difference is at once apparent. We may take a solitary frog and rear him from the egg in an aquarium. If, subsequently, we remove him to a pond, he will take his place with his fellows at once. He has little, if anything, to learn. Instinctively he knows his food, and how to seek it; his enemies and rivals, and how to escape or fight them; his mate, and how to deal with her; and she knows how to dispose of her eggs. But how forlorn and helpless would be a man reared from infancy in a dark cell out of sight and sound of his kind, and then turned into a world where his _experienced_ fellows struggle for existence! [Sidenote: Fear is the Result of Experience]