Cardinal Newman once remarked, with a sense of surprise, that "we know less of the animals than we do of the angels," and when one remembers the disproportionate attention given the two subjects this is hardly cause for wonder. One of the favourite texts of the never-ending debates of the schoolmen of the Middle Ages was the question whether sixty thousand angels would have room to stand on the point of a needle; and upon this and cognate subjects ... "Doctor and Saint--they heard great argument About it, and About: and ever more Came out by that same door wherein they went." But of any study of what we call--in our topping human fashion--"the lower orders of creation" the history of the schools contains not a single record. Even since science has begun to divert the world's mind from the study of the macrocosm, to the contemplation of the microcosm this same ingrained contempt and misunderstanding of the animals has led to the most amazing ideas. Descartes, whose study of the reflex actions of the muscles curiously anticipated some of the subtlest discoveries made recently in Chicago by Professor Loeb, propounded the theory, in his "Réponses," that animals were mere automata--which ate without pleasure, cried without pain, desired nothing, knew nothing, and only simulated intelligence as a bee simulates a mathematician. He says: "Among the movements that take place in us there are many which do not depend upon the mind at all, such as the beating of the heart, the digestion of food, nutrition, and respiration, walking, singing, and other similar actions when they are performed without the mind thinking of them. And when one, who falls from a height throws his hands forward to save his head, it is in virtue of no ratiocination that he performs this action. It does not depend upon his mind, but takes place merely because his senses being affected by present danger some change arises in his brain which affects the nerves in such a manner as is required to produce the motion, in the same manner as in a machine, and without the mind being able to hinder it. Now since we observe this in ourselves, why should we be so astonished if the light reflected from the body of a wolf into the eye of a sheep has the same force to excite it into the motion of flight?" Why on the other hand should we refuse to think that the light reflected from the body of a lion into the eye of Descartes himself should have the power of exciting him into the motion of flight, without his mind being concerned in the matter at all--except that Descartes himself would assure us with his own lips that this was not so.