Few will be found to deny or even to question the fact that our dumb companions and four-footed friends have mental faculties which enable them accurately to adjust their actions to the varied circumstances in the midst of which their lives are passed. Even if we see cause to hesitate, as I myself hesitate, before we ascribe to them self-consciousness and reason, in the narrower sense in which this word is used; still we must acknowledge that their instincts are powerful, their intelligence wonderfully keen and active; and that they are capable of strong emotional feeling both of affection and of antipathy. Should we so welcome them as our companions and friends if we regarded them as unconscious, insentient automata? But when we turn to the other end of the scale of life, to the amœba and all the myriad minutiae that swarm in ponds and stagnant pools, we are wont to speak with less confidence. Their consciousness, if so we can call it, is of so simple an order, their sentience of so low a grade, that we can hardly with any accuracy use the phrase “mental faculties” with reference to organisms so lowly. We feel uncertain whether in their case unconscious automatism does not after all pretty accurately express the facts. At any rate it would trouble us little or not at all if some one proved their automatism to-morrow. And yet, on the theory of evolution, out of such lowly beginnings have sprung the sagacity and affectionate devotion of the dog. But if the amœba and his tribe are insentient automata, at what stage of the development did consciousness creep in? And whence came it? Or put what is fundamentally the same question in another way. In the common course of generation the dog is developed from a minute egg-cell, one hundredth of an inch or less in diameter, with which a yet more minute sperm has entered into fertile union. Supplied with shelter, warmth, and nutriment by that maternal self-sacrifice which is a deeply significant fact of organic progress, this little speck of living stuff passes, by a process strictly continuous, though profoundly modified by the catastrophe of birth, into the dog with its wealth of intelligence and affection. It is surely impossible without extravagance to speak of the fertilised ovum as conscious. Where then in the continuous process of development does consciousness come in? How, and whence? We are not nowadays to be put off with the ambiguous assertion that consciousness and intelligence are “potentially” present in the germ. We ask: What is _actually_ present therein as the basis of this potentiality? Or are we told that consciousness dawns at or shortly after the catastrophe of birth? Then again we ask: Whence comes this dawning consciousness, and by what means does it become associated with the puppy’s brain? In yet another form does a question of like general implication suggest itself. Granted that in the ovum there is present something which we may call the