Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/433

Rh of your hand, and the frog, so long as you are reasonably slow in your movements, will work backward and forward like a clock." Referring to this experiment, Prof. Huxley afterward says: "If the frog were a philosopher he might reason thus: 'I feel myself uncomfortable and slipping, and, feeling myself uncomfortable, I put my legs out to save myself, knowing that I shall tumble if I do not put them farther. I put them farther still, and my volition brings about all these beautiful adjustments which result in my sitting safely!' But, if the frog so reasoned, he would be entirely mistaken, for the frog does the thing just as well when he has no reason, no sensation, no possibility of thought of any kind. The only conclusion, then, at which there seems any good ground for arriving is, that animals are machines, but that they are conscious machines." And he afterward says: "Undoubtedly, I do hold that the view I have taken of the relations between the physical and mental faculties of brutes applies in its fullness and entirety to man." Of this last experiment Prof. Huxley further says: "And what is still more wonderful is, that if you put the frog on a table, and put a book between him and the light, and give him a little jog behind, he will jump (take a long jump, very possibly), but he won't jump against the book, he will jump to the right or to the left, but he will get out of the way, showing that, although he is absolutely insensible to ordinary impressions of light, there is still something which passes through the sensory nerve, acts upon the machinery of his nervous system, and causes it to adapt itself to the proper action." This is certainly very wonderful, and becomes even more so when taken in connection with the next case—that of a man who had been shot in the head, and who, Prof. Huxley says, "is in a condition absolutely parallel to that of the frog," but afterward says, "very nearly" in the same condition, and also says, "he has only one sense organ in a state of activity, namely, that of touch, which is exceedingly delicate." Yet of this man, thus described as virtually in the same condition as the frog, except that he has a very delicate sense of touch, we are told that, "if an obstacle is put in his way, he knocks against it, feels it, and goes to one side; if you push him in any direction, he goes straight on until something stops him."

It is certainly very remarkable that the frog, with no sense at all, avoids leaping against the obstruction, while the man, with a delicate sense of touch, and other conditions parallel or very nearly the same as the frog, knocks against it. It must be a very curious mechanism which can make such discrimination in the effects of its action.

Let us examine the case of the frog a little further. Prof. Huxley ascribes its leaping obliquely and not directly forward to "a something which passes through the sensory nerve, acts upon the machinery of his nervous system, and causes it to adapt itself to the proper action," and this "although he is absolutely insensible to ordinary impressions of light." Does Prof. Huxley mean that this "something"