Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/67

Rh tend to make all the individuals of a class alike in physical and pyschicalpsychical [sic] endowments, give place to more complex sensations, gathered from a wider range of surroundings. The cerebrum begins to take cognizance of these sensations, and to give its approval, before they are translated into actions; memory dawns—hatred, fear, anger, and revenge, are born; a certain adapting of means to ends gives evidence of commencing reason; affection, love of approbation, joy, and sorrow, all these appearing in the races most associated with man, proclaim the presence of faculties and endowments far above the plane of mere instinct, and bordering close upon attributes usually applied to soul alone, and in its more dignified estates.

Examples of such endowments in the brute races can hardly have escaped the notice of any intelligent observer. In the faithful dog, who at a word from his master collects the stray flock in the stormy Highlands, or brings in the helpless and perishing traveler from the snowy Alps; who shields his child playmate from the passing danger, or rescues him from threatening death; who, himself hungry, guards food for others; who with quick perception notes and shares his master's varying moods, and who metes out justice for the weak against the strong, we behold in humble guise a dawning soul, with which no truly noble soul need wish to ignore kinship.

To note all the improvements in the physical organ of mind in man, and point out the vast psychical advances which are found in him, compared with the best of the races beneath him, would far exceed our limits. We may, however, notice here that, as in his nervous organization, no distinctly new parts are discoverable, but only general growth and development, and especially vast increase in the size and working capacity of the cerebrum, together with improved lines of communication between the different parts of the brain, so in the psychical manifestations which this enlarged and better-developed brain exhibits, no faculties are discovered beyond what these various developments in structure render possible. Does man possess intelligence? It is found also in the lower tribes. Memory? Many races of animals possess it. Reason? No definition of it can be formed, consistent with its exercise in man, which can debar it from some feeble exercise in his more lowly companions. Up to the point which their organization permits, they possess and exercise faculties akin to those of man. But it is in the degree and perfection to which these faculties attain that the superiority of man is evident; and here the difference is vast indeed. The intellectual superiority of an ordinary man over the most sagacious animal, which nevertheless can scarcely be taught the simplest relation of numbers, is too vast to be readily comprehended; but so is the difference immense between the reasoning powers of an infant and a man, or a Hottentot and a Cuvier or Laplace. If a dog cannot be taught simple arithmetic, neither can a Hottentot be taught optics nor analytical geometry, nor be made to