Vestiges of the Natural History of CreationChambers, Robert
Science
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
Chambers, Robert
Creation; Evolution (Biology)
exposure to the influences of refined society. On the accomplishments
acquired by animals it were superfluous to enter at any length; but I may
advert to the dogs of M. Leonard, as remarkable examples of what the
animal intellect may be trained to. When four pieces of card are laid
down before them, each having a number pronounced _once_ in connexion
with it, they will, after a re-arrangement of the pieces, select any one
named by its number. They also play at dominoes, and with so much skill
as to triumph over biped opponents, whining if the adversary place a
wrong piece, or if they themselves be deficient in a right one. Of
extensive combinations of thought we have no reason to believe that any
animal is capable—and yet most of us must feel the force of Walter
Scott’s remark, that there was scarcely anything which he would not
believe of a dog. There is a curious result of education in certain
animals, namely, that habits to which they have been trained in some
instances become hereditary. For example, the accomplishment of pointing
at game, although a pure result of education, appears in the young pups
brought up apart from their parents and kind. The peculiar leap of the
Irish horse, acquired in the course of traversing a boggy country, is
continued in the progeny brought up in England. This hereditariness of
specific habits suggests a relation to that form of psychological
demonstration usually called instinct; but instinct is only another term
for mind, or is mind in a peculiar stage of development; and though the
fact were otherwise, it could not affect the postulate, that
demonstrations such as have been enumerated are mainly intellectual
demonstrations, not to be distinguished as such from those of human
beings.
More than this, the lower animals manifested mental phenomena long before
man existed. While as yet there was no brain capable of working out a
mathematical problem, the economy of the six-sided figure was exemplified
by the instinct of the bee. Ere human musician had whistled or piped,
the owl hooted in B flat, the cuckoo had her song of a falling third, and
the chirp of the cricket was in B. The dog and the elephant prefigured
the sagacity of the human mind. The love of a human mother for her babe
was anticipated by nearly every humbler mammal, the carnaria not
excepted. The peacock strutted, the turkey blustered, and the cock
fought for victory, just as human beings afterwards did, and still do.
Our faculty of imitation, on which so much of our amusement depends, was
exercised by the mocking-bird; and the whole tribe of monkeys must have
walked about the pre-human world, playing off those tricks in which we
see the comicality and mischief-making of our character so curiously
exaggerated.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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