Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/146

138 effect dependent upon the necessity of modifying instincts. The higher an animal may be in the scale of life, the author assumes, the more varied become its relations to surrounding things and the less suited to varying circumstances becomes a mechanical and rigid instinct. If, however, there is a period of youth during which inherited instincts may be used merely as a vehicle for redundant energy, an opportunity is afforded for modification and alteration of the rigid system. The instinct of a creature with practically no period of youth, as with insects, must be complete and ready for use. The mammal or bird, however, passes through a period of youth "during which it has no immediate duties to perform and is cared for by its parents. In this time it plays with its instincts, learns to fly or to run and jump, to recognize its kind, to distinguish between the palatable and unpalatable, to make and understand call notes or cries of alarm; in a thousand ways to suit each occasion with its action and deserve a place in the hierarchy of intelligent beings." The games and sports earliest to appear in animals and most universal are classed by Prof. Groos as those of experiment and curiosity. "Young creatures play with everything that attracts their attention. They try their teeth or their claws on every available object. They taste and smell, rush and tumble about, collect in heaps or scatter everything they are able to reach, and, indeed, make attempts on the unattainable. The greater the intelligence of the adult animal the more surprisingly the young animal treats its surroundings in the spirit of an empirical philosopher. A young monkey observed by a sister of the late Prof. Romanes discovered for itself that the handle of a hearth brush was screwed into a socket. It succeeded in unscrewing the handle with ease, and after long experiments discovered that only one end twisted in a particular direction would fit into the socket. Another young monkey, chained just beyond the reach of a fire, found out how to tear strips from a newspaper and roll them up into tapers sufficiently long to reach the flames. By some such fertile employment of curiosity the professor thinks that the ancestors of man may have gained their mastery over fire." Skill in flying is attained by considerable practice, and "in mammals the exercises of the young bear a definite relation to adult habit. Mountain-living creatures, like kids and chamois, continually practice standing jumps, springing vertically into the air. . . . Gazelles, on the other hand, which have to jump watercourses and gullies on the Veldt, confine their youthful enthusiasm to practice of the running jump. Similarly the play of tiger cubs with balls or with the tail of their mother, and the wrestling and mimic combats of other carnivorous young, all exhibit an instinctive bias by which the restless zeal of youth is disciplined for the real purposes of maturity."

Seals and their Pups.—A fur seal has none of the altruistic instincts of some other animals, for it will never feed any pup but her own. Not a very affectionate mother at best, she yet unerringly knows her nursling's voice, and he in turn learns to find her. When they meet and recognize each other at meal time, it is easy to see that they belong together. Her duty done, however, she lets it shift for itself till the next feeding time. She instantly knows any little hungry intruder that is stealing up to her to get a meal on the sly. She cuffs and bites, until the starveling, intimidated, slinks away to die. These orphaned younglings are the fruit of the indiscriminate "pelagic" sealing. Their mother being killed, and they unable to obtain another nurse, they perish by the thousands. A United States report estimates the number for 1896 at 20,331.

The Last Resting Place of Pasteur.—On December 26, 1896, the remains of Pasteur were borne to their final resting place, a crypt at the Pasteur Institute. On the stone is inscribed a sentence from his reception speech at the Academy: "Heureux celui qui porte en soi un dieu, un idéal de beauté, et qui lui obéit—idéal de l'art, idéal de la science, idéal de la patrie, idéal des vertus de l'évangile" ("Happy he who bears within him a god, an ideal of beauty, and follows it—an ideal of art, an ideal of science, an ideal of patriotism, an ideal of the Christian virtues"). Many men of science and thinkers of note, both French and foreign, were present, and deputations and wreaths were sent by scientific societies. A service at Notre Dame, where the remains had been