Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/274

262 fervor of his genius. But even of his great promise we could gather no articulate account. He was still in the period of early youth, and perhaps was brooding over the designs by which he hoped to transform, in some future day, the world of the cathedral close. But, as a rule, it is certain that we teach our domestic animals as the Cingalese teach their tame elephants, to discourage steadily and effectually everything like eccentricities, whether deliberate or capricious, or assertions of liberty, on the part of their wilder colleagues, and so drill them into our dead-level of habit.

What important variations of character, however, might we not promote if we took more pains to foster what a writer of thirty years ago used to call "the individuality of the individual" among our friends of the lower races! Sir John Lubbock thinks that he has partially taught a poodle to read, but, as a correspondent of ours once suggested, that may be a step in the wrong direction—not a development of the true genius of the dog, but an attempt to merge the genius of the dog in habits peculiar to man, and likely rather to result in ingrafting an imitative humanity on a totally different kind of capacity. On the other hand, in his experiments on ants. Sir John Lubbock has gone on the sounder principle of setting the ants problems to solve for themselves—a principle which has resulted in showing that different races of ants have very different resources, and that different individuals, even in the same race, show a very different amount of resource in dealing with the same difficulty. This is confirmed by what we know of our more intimate friends among the domestic animals; and surely we should do more to develop their capacity by stimulating them to meet difficulties by their own resources than we can effect by taking their training so completely under our own care. Is it not possible that, as things go, the companionship of man is rather an incubus on the natural genius of the inferior animals than a help to its development? It is clear that the ants, at least, are more sagacious in proportion as they live more apart from man, and are thrown upon their own resources. The harvesting-ants of Texas and the leaf-cutting and military ants of Nicaragua are far higher in civilization than the ants of the more densely peopled countries of Europe. In proportion as they have a freer scope for their efforts, their social communities appear to be founded on a more advanced intelligence and organization. Is it not possible that we stunt the intelligence of our humbler fellow-creatures by doing so much for them, and permitting them to do so little for themselves?

Certainly there is far too little disposition to allow of eccentricity in the lower animals and for what comes of eccentricity. Half-domesticated birds, however, will occasionally show very remarkable eccentricities, and even appear to be making experiments—though experiments which we should, of course, regard as of a very unscientific kind—in the modification of their own instincts. The present writer knows