Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/378

364 unknown seas by the aid of the same geographical second-sight which guided the Philadelphia pigeons to their native roost. According to a well-authenticated report, the crew of a British East Indiaman caught an enormous tortoise near St. Helena, marked it with the brand of the company, and quartered it in the cockpit, but in the English Channel their captive crawled on deck and plunged overboard. Two years after, the same tortoise was caught in Sandy Bay near Jamestown, on the south coast of St. Helena. No ocean-current could have carried it there; it must have navigated by its inner compass a distance of seven thousand English miles.

Should the occult sense be merely an unknown function of a well known organ? A person whose eyesight is limited to the range of his ear-shot would fail to comprehend how an earthly being could see stars beyond the boundaries of the solar system, and a nation of mole eyed men would speak of the instinct that enables a homo of a different species to reach a distant village by keeping his eye on the steeple. We may have a dormant rudiment of that same sixth sense. Perhaps it awakens in the pulmonary beatitude that expands our chests in the atmosphere of a sunlit forest, or in the nausea induced by the effluvium of a stagnant bayou. Neither sensation is necessarily dependent on the olfactory sense.

We have lost several faculties from sheer disuse, but it is not probable that their number includes the instinct of orientation. It is deficient in many of our fellow creatures, both of the higher and lower orders. Monkeys, sheep, black cattle, gallinaceous birds, lizards, and lepidopterous insects seem to be almost devoid of it. Should we not be able to detect some characteristic structural difference between monkeys, chickens, and lizards on the one hand, and dogs, pigeons, and tortoises on the other? A peculiar instinct must correspond to some peculiar organization, and I think that specialty could be determined in the domestic dog if anywhere. For many reasons the modus operandi of a function can be more easily observed in a docile mammal than in a reptile or a shy bird, and, if we hope to force the intrenchments of the enigma, we had better "fight it out on this line." If one of the five senses should be the functional medium of the strange instinct, there must be ways and means to identify it; if there is such a thing as a sixth sense, we should be able to locate its organ. The "intuitive cerebration" theory is untenable. In the well-known axiom that nothing comes within the ken of our intellect but what has entered by the gate of the senses, we may confidently substitute "intuition" for "intellect." In other words, we have few reasons to doubt and many reasons to suspect that every psychic emotion, as well as perception, is the reflex of some organic impression.